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Science Commons
Since the release of CC0, I’ve been talking to many people about when and how to use it. A group of scientists and science policy experts recently endorsed public domain data sharing, and the use of CC0 to do so, in a letter to Nature. This is a significant affirmation of our approach to data sharing. But a question that inevitably arises in many discussions is: What about data providers that are unable or unwilling to commit their data to the public domain? Will Creative Commons support providing a flexible set of
licensing options, intermediate between public domain, on the one hand, and full control (secrecy), on the other?
First, I have to clarify what I mean by “data” in this discussion. “Data” by itself can mean anything, including music, movies, pictures, and other things that are clearly copyrightable. But in this discussion, I will use the term “data” in a narrower and more specific sense: we mean facts, ideas, and concepts that are not copyrightable by themselves. An example would be Einstein’s E=MC^2 equation, the height of Mount Everest, or the coordinates of a particular star. The unprotected status of these data was affirmed in Feist Publications vs. Rural Telephone Service, where the U.S. Supreme Court found that originality is a basic Constitutional prerequisite for copyright to exist, or as Justice O’Conner, writing for the majority, said: “It is this bedrock principle of copyright that … No one may claim originality as to facts.” (emphasis added) The U.S Copyright Act further codifies this principle as a limitation on the scope of copyright protection (at Section 102(b)). Likewise, other countries recognize this limitation in their originality requirements.
This basic limitation on the scope copyright acknowledges that copyright is inherently a social compromise between the desire to reward authors for creative output and the need to protect a reservoir of facts and ideas available for everyone to draw upon. Without this “commons” of facts and …