Everipedia sounds even worse, because they sound like the kind of
move-fast-and-break-laws blockchain startup that thinks the legal system is
something that happens to other people. But Roberto Navigli is a respected
academic and presumably has some interest in following the law, if he can
be convinced that his self-serving interpretation of the law will not hold
up.
Again, there has to be a process that's been followed before, right?
BabelNet and Everipedia can't be the first instances of people dumping all
the data from Wikimedia projects into their own projects without following
the license.
Another interesting twist: the CC-By-NC-SA download they offered to "people
wanting to use BabelNet for research purposes" has been taken offline "for
the Easter holiday", which approximately coincides with when Navigli
responded to my e-mail, but unless Easter is a very long holiday in Italy I
suspect that it's gone for the indefinite future. So they aren't sharing
_anything_ anymore.
I believe that what BabelNet needs to do is:
- Change the license of BabelNet from CC-By-NC-SA 3.0 to CC-By-SA 4.0
- Add attribution and license information to their images (or remove the
image galleries)
- Relicense or remove the dependencies of BabelNet that have non-commercial
licenses (they use a toolkit called JLTUtils that is developed at the same
university, under a CC-By-NC-SA license, which is strange because it
appears to be software and not content)
- Reinstate the downloadable version of the data, with no academic-only
restrictions
I don't want to end up issuing some sort of copyright takedown against
BabelNet. It's a project that should keep existing, but under the correct
license.
On Wed, 11 Apr 2018 at 09:49 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
They also appear to be using photos from Wikimedia
Commons without paying
attention to the license. I can find photos of mine that are CC-BY-SA-4.0
licensed that are being used without any metadata at all, let alone
attribution and the correct CC license info…
The same is also true for Everipedia, BTW.
Thanks,
Mike
On 10 Apr 2018, at 14:43, Rob Speer
<rob.speer(a)gmail.com> wrote:
BabelNet (
http://babelnet.org) is a multilingual knowledge resource that
defines words and phrases in many languages. I've noticed that it copies
large amounts of content from Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia,
Wiktionary, and Wikiquote, while violating Wikimedia's CC-By-SA license
by
placing the content under an incompatible
CC-By-NC-SA license.
As one example, I can search BabelNet for "Timsort", a Wikipedia article
whose first sentence is one I wrote:
http://live.babelnet.org/synset?word=Timsort&lang=EN&details=1&…
The sentence I wrote appears at the top of the page (with credit to
Wikipedia). The rest of the page is also content remixed from Wikipedia,
including a gallery of images that are presented without credit. A
scrolly
box in the footer of the page says the content is
under the CC-By-NC-SA
3.0
license. Other pages, such as
http://babelnet.org/synset?word=bn:00852566n,
combine data from multiple different resources.
The BabelNet creators are aware of the CC-By-SA licenses of the resources
they use (see
http://babelnet.org/licenses/). In addition to the
non-commercial license they offer, their company, Babelscape (
http://babelscape.com/), sells commercial licenses to BabelNet.
I reached out to Roberto Navigli, who runs BabelNet and Babelscape, over
e-mail on March 23. I asked if the non-commercial license clause was
simply
a mistake. In his reply, Navigli stated that
BabelNet is not a derived
work, but is a CC-By-NC-SA-licensed collection made of several different
works. I responded that BabelNet doesn't meet the Creative Commons
definition of a "Collective Work", which would be necessary for it to not
be a derived work. Navigli responded:
"actually it is a collection of derivative work of several resources with
heretogeneous licenses, each of which clearly separated with separate
licenses and bundles. By transitivity derivative work is work with a
certain license, so it is work. Therefore, it is a collection of works
with
different licenses and it can keep a separate
license."
I believe this is nonsense on multiple levels. BabelNet is a derived
work,
and if someone could disregard their obligation
to share-alike their
derived work simply because they derived it from multiple resources,
there
would be no point to putting ShareAlike clauses
on data resources at all.
As a Wikipedia contributor (and a lapsed admin), I am sad to see BabelNet
appropriating the hard work of Wikimedians and others, placing a more
restrictive license on it, and selling it. This is also relevant for me
because I run ConceptNet (
http://www.conceptnet.io/), a similar
knowledge
resource, and I have made sure to follow Creative
Commons license
requirements and to release all its data as CC-By-SA.
In a way I see BabelNet as a competitor, but ConceptNet is an open data
project and this space shouldn't have "competitors". If the Creative
Commons license were being used appropriately, then all of us working
with
this kind of data would be collaborators in the
world of Linked Open
Data.
My preferred outcome would be to get BabelNet to
change the copyright
notices and Creative Commons links on their site to remove the
"non-commercial" requirement, and to be able to download and use their
data
under the CC-By-SA license that it should be
under.
I'm sure Wikimedia has dealt with similar situations to this. What would
be
the most effective next step to ensure that
BabelNet follows the CC-By-SA
license?
-- Rob Speer
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