On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Gergő Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
("Shameful" was an unnecessarily confrontational choice of word; I
apologize.)
Thanks.
There is also the practical matter of facts not being
copyrightable in the
US, and non-zero CC licenses not being particularly useful for databases
(what you want is something like the GPL Affero for databases and CC does
not have such a license).
That hasn't stopped DBpedia and other open-content databases (the
Paleobiology database for example[1]) from using CC licenses requiring
attribution.
DBpedia arguably had to, because its database is derived from Wikipedia,
which has an attribution required, share-alike license: "DBpedia is derived
from Wikipedia and is distributed under the same licensing terms as
Wikipedia itself."[2]
To the extent that Wikidata draws on Wikipedia, its CC0 license would
appear to be a gross violation of Wikipedia's share-alike license
requirement.
The generation of data always has a social context. Knowing where data come
from is a good thing.
[1]
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/41216
[2]
http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint