[tei-council] jTEI licensing (was Re: Fwd: TEI licensing issues)

[Kevin Hawkins]

On 9/14/2011 8:32 AM, James Cummings wrote:
> For the record, I think that the choice of CC+BY+ND for jTEI, and
> specifically that an article's copyright seems to be vested in
> the TEI Consortium rather than the original authors was a
> mistake. (I would have been happier with CC+BY with copyright
> vested in the author, that would not prevent the TEI-C doing what
> it needs to do.)

Since I am responsible for the decision, let me explain the approach.

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to copyright in publishing. 
  One is that (a) authors keep the copyright but give some bundle of 
rights to the publisher.  The second is that (b) authors transfer the 
copyright but retain some bundle of rights.  In either case, the size of 
"some bundle of rights" varies considerably.

Approach (a) has been known the worsen the orphan works problem because 
it becomes difficult to track down the author to get additional rights 
not covered by the original agreement between the author and the 
publisher.  For that reason, I wrote the agreement to use approach (b), 
with a very large bundle of rights given back to the author.  In fact, I 
tried to grant back everything I could think of.  jTEI also grant rights 
to the reader (through CC-BY-ND).

James's approach is to do (a) but give a huge large bundle of rights 
(CC-BY) to the publisher *and to readers*.  This would in fact probably 
not worsen the orphan works problem because we have trouble imaging 
anyone wanting to make use of a work in a way that the rightsholder 
would approve of if the rightsholder could be found.

So the only concerns are edge cases: for jTEI's current arrangement, 
that an author wants to do something with the work that is not allowed 
by the author agreement, and for James's approach, that a user wants to 
do something not allowed by CC-BY (that is, not credit the creator).  It 
seems to me that either approach is equally effective.

 > However, I'm assuming that the licensing of jTEI
> is off the table for the current discussions and it is just
> guidelines/other-websites/software/schemas/other-outputs that
> we're concerned with.

Yes, I think so.  At this point 
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Council-licensing only includes things 
produced by Council; jTEI is not produced by Council.

--Kevin