Like many, I believe that knowledge is our common inheritance and that everyone advances if it is freely shared. These are the fundamental principles of scientific endeavor. I have benefited enormously from the effort and generosity of many. It is literally true that I do not remember from whom I learned what; but my debt to you is profound and heart-felt.
For me, the operative question is how I can best help share knowledge. This document represents my and my group's present view. I hasten to add that our own practice is imperfect, particularly as our ideas about the granularity of accession numbers and attribution evolve. Nonetheless, we make an honest effort to live up to these views.
Richard Stallman makes a strong argument that placing code (and indirectly, data) into the public domain does not prevent behaviors inimical to the sharing of knowledge. Thus, copyleft is designed both to protect the intellectual integrity of a person's work and the rights of all people to freely diffuse that work. To do this, it exploits existing legal mechanisms in the United States and many other countries which sanction bad behaviors and enforce good ones in courts of law. An outstanding example of copyleft is the GNU General Public License and its relatives.
Other public licenses, such as the Perl Artistic License and the LaTeX Project Public License, use legal mechanisms to enforce intellectual integrity, particularly in the naming and modification of code, but otherwise do not attempt to govern the behavior of others. For widely-used and distributed software projects, governing code modification is very important, and especially so for asynchronous and loosely coordinated development over the net. In my view, these licenses incorporate good scholarly practice as applied to code, and it seems our existing social mechanisms of personal morality, utilitarian value, and public opinion are effective enforcers of these scholarly conventions. (For overviews of the issues, check FSF's and Graham Williams's taxonomies of types of software.)
I strongly agree that all should act to further the goals of intellectual integrity and free diffusion of knowledge. Our debt to these principles is acutely apparent in our own work, which draws extensively on the knowledge and efforts of many, many people. Since I strongly believe data to be a public good, I cannot bring myself to copyright them in any form. This is consistent with my understanding of U.S. copyright law, which holds that only the presentation of data can be copyright. My understanding of the law in other places, especially the European Community, is that it does permit the copyright of the data themselves: this I unequivocably decline. However, I am also uncomfortable with legally mandating the behavior of others. In good conscience, I cannot presume that my views or situation will apply to all persons and all situations for the foreseeable future. Honorable people will disagree with these decisions for good reason and choose differently.
So I prefer to place our own --- not anyone else's! --- work in the public domain and trust each of you to follow your conscience. By placing our work in the public domain, we assure access to it. I believe the ordinary scholarly practices of attribution work well in this situation, and I request that you follow them, both with respect to our work and any modifications you make to it. This is just taking responsibility for one's own efforts, good, bad, or indifferent. I hope we collectively manage to avoid confusion while sustaining a vigorous scientific dialogue.
Toni Kazic, February 28, 2002