Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

[James H]

Dear COMCIFS,

It may come as some surprise that no licence is attached to our
dictionaries. As these are machine-readable, they are available for other
automated ontology-management systems (e.g. EMMO) to ingest and transform,
however, the lack of a licence opens them up to perceived legal jeopardy.
>From time to time in the past licensing has been raised but not followed
through on, the latest as far as I can tell being 2011. An educational
thread from 1999 can be read
https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00032.html and the
statement of IUCr policy originating at that time is at
https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy

Since that time, Creative Commons have produced licences for material that
is intended to be shared. These licenses are designed to work across
international legal systems. The two which seem most appropriate to us are
CC0 (public domain), which is essentially renouncing all rights conferred
by copyright, and CC-BY, which does the same, but requires attribution and
that any changes to the original are clearly indicated. I urge you to have
a look at https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ for background on
creative commons.

Having pondered the above, I would like now to propose that our
dictionaries are licensed as CC-BY, for the following reasons, based on the
decision points in the Creative Commons "chooser" tool:

1. We need to pick a licence for clarity (see above)
2. CC0 (public domain) would theoretically allow somebody to take our
dictionaries and claim them as their own or to distribute subtly but
incorrectly modified versions. Note that the wwPDB does license their data
as CC0, so this concern on my part may be misguided, particularly in a
scientific community where the IUCr is an authoritative source
3. We do not wish to restrict use of our dictionaries for commercial
purposes, for example, if a diffractometer manufacturer wished to bundle a
dictionary and add their own data names to it, they should not need to
spend their time or our time gaining permission. Simply following the rules
for attribution and flagging modifications should be enough.
4. Transformation and adaptation of our dictionaries is an increasingly
common approach as neighbouring disciplines realise that they can save a
lot of time (e.g. the ongoing EMMO work). Allowing this type of
modification is just normal scientific practice, where one group builds on
the openly available results of other groups, so we should not restrict it
5. We could require that any modified versions are published under the same
licence, which would then make it CC-BY-ShareAlike. My opinion is that this
type of restriction just introduces friction, for example, some funding
body may require all outputs to be licensed according to some quite liberal
licence that is not clearly compatible with CC-BY-ShareAlike, and so
there's a need to seek an exemption.

Please discuss. Those with insight into the wwPDB's choice of CC0 are
welcome to weigh in. If there are no outstanding objections by the end of
the month I will take that as agreement.

best wishes,
James.
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