If someone with less rusty coding skills wanted to play with some of these questions, by the way, it might be interesting to poke at commoncrawl.org's data set to answer some of these questions. 

For example, you could see what %age of works there indicated a CC license as an attempt to understand the overall number of/popularity of CC.

It has also been suggested to me (off-list) that someone could do something like this to investigate the open license infringement question:

1. Identify 100-200 most common openly-licensed java libraries (.jars)
2. Find instances of those in commoncrawl (if commoncrawl does not discard code files)
3. Attempt to identify what, if any, license compliance was occurring around redistribution of those libraries.

Same approach could be done with popular commons images, of course, though .jar files may be easier to identify/focus on.

Thinking out loud-
Luis

On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Here are the four basic questions (copied from the document) and some quick comments in italics.

"In effect the first point, which we propose as the starting point for our study, amounts to a quantification of the contribution of works made available under PD&OL to the economy. In order to make such quantification, we need to answer some basic questions:
  • Which are the sectors that produce works that are licensed under PD&OL, and which are the sectors that use them (the proposal provides some examples, but we need more systematic information)—is this information available?

    LV: We could create a more rigorously compiled list, but I’m not aware of “quantification” in the sense they seem to be wanting.

  • Given that these works are not registered anywhere, where should we look for data on the quantity of such works?

    LV: CC has gathered numbers on this in the past; could talk to them about it?

  • Do BEUC/EDRi/Wikimedia have any suggestions as to valuation methods?

    LV: The best thing I’m aware of on this is http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2338563 (Economic Value of Wikipedia, by Jonathan Band), which contains a number of valuation metrics that could be extended to open culture more generally.

  • “Open license” does not mean that one can do with the work whatever one wants. Is infringement or misuse a problem for the open source community, and if so, are there are any studies that have examined its extent and impact? 

    LV: None that I’m aware of, but I’ll ask around and get back to the list.
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.


On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:00 AM, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

The IPR Observatory [1] of the European Commission have now officially included a study requested by us with the support of other civil society actors in their 2015 working programme. The study is on "economic contribution of public domain and open licensing".

The Observatory has sent us some additional questions now that might be important for the final outcome. I would appreciate any comments/ideas/help in answering those in the best possible way. The questions can be seen in the PDF attachment.

Thanks a lot!
Dimi
<Questions_WG_23092014.pdf>




--
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.