AR01042_WODAN_Final_Report_10.pdf - The Heritage Council

8 Licensing of the WODAN database.
The WODAN database will house a large body of unpublished material. This needs some form of
licensing regulation to ensure that people’s data is not being used in an inappropriate manner.
Obviously this is not the first time such a situation has occurred and there are many precedents
for similar circumstances.
Two types of licensing agreements will be reviewed: creative commons and the data access
policy – Global Palaeofire working group
8.1 Creative commons
This can be found at www.creativecommons.org and the tag line is Share, Remix, Reuse, the idea
is to help people easily and quickly understand what they can do with a piece of work created by
someone else.
Creative Commons as a corporation are a non-profit, community-based (online community that
is) organization that provide free licenses and legal tools to mark work thus allowing easy sharing
with limited risk of getting your work stolen or not properly credited. As they aim to promote a
standard, using CC tools helps end users to quickly understand how they can reuse the work and
so encourages sharing.
The website offers form-based legal documents and advice on how to use them to protect your
work in whichever way you want it protected. Once a license is attached to a piece of work there
is little further connection with the Creative Commons organization as their use does not require
further involvement, e.g. paying to access the terms.
At a basic level a piece of work protected by a CC license requires the original author to be
properly attributed. Unless the author specifies the manner of attribution then five basic principles
apply: copyright notices must be left intact and reproduced proportionately; the authors name (or
other user identity) must be cited; the work’s title (if one exists) must be cited; the CC license
must be cited; and finally if the work has been adapted in any way this must be stated.
There are six main, commonly-used licenses and they are identifiable by four symbols (see
below). With regard to WODAN, the advantages of licensing by symbols is instantly identifiable
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