Tag: license

Software license and use of end-product

In one of his buzz, Cédric Bonhomme drew my attention on the Highcharts javascript library. This library can produce beautiful charts of various types with some Ajax interaction. The only negative point imho is that it is dual-licensed and all cases deprive you from your freedom:

there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ;
there is a commercial license for any other website.

Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.

Published in Schmap

One of my photos on Flickr is now on Schmap, a website providing travel guides for some destinations in the world (only Europe, North America and Australasia for now). See here how it looks.

What was interesting for me was the way they did it. I came to know it via an e-mail from Emma Williams (from Schmap) telling me my photo was included. And, at first sight (*), they correctly understand the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0: attribution is on their website, as well as the “cc” logo next to the image. And they link to the the image on Flickr 🙂

(*) If you read the terms of use, you’ll notice all the material (including third-party material) “are protected by copyright laws. You may only access and use the Materials for personal or educational purposes and not for resell or commercial purposes by You or any third parties”. My photo is also protected by copyright laws but you can access it for other purposes than personal or educational uses, you can sell them (the cc-by-sa allows it). Since the transformation they did is “only” a resizing, does it really matter since the original material is given and resizing is easy to re-do?

Un-published in Nature (NRSC)

In the last post, I told you one of my photo on Flickr was published in an article from Nature Reports Stem Cells. After some discussions with three friends, I decided to write an e-mail to the journal editors basically stating that, although I enjoyed my photo being shown in their journal, they did not comply with one of the two conditions of the CC-by-sa license (the “Share-Alike” part, more details in the copy of my e-mail). I chose this licence for this photo because it is there to give freedom to other people on some material while this freedom stays with the media even if the latter is modified.

The answer quickly came from Matthew Day, database publisher:

From: Matthew Day
To: Jean-Etienne Poirrier
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 20:55:39 +0200
Subject: RE: Photo license issue

Dear Jean-Etienne,

I’m sorry that we have published a derivative of your image without putting the new work under a Creative Commons license. As you adroitly guessed, we cannot publish the derivative work under CC as it contains components from other sources.

I would be willing to discuss with you a way of keeping the image, and your credit, on the NRSC article. However, an additional complexity is that I see that you are posting a PDF of the article on your blog. The cleanest solution for us may be to simply remove the image and PDF from our websites.

If you’d like to discuss this, I could call you tomorrow or Friday if you are free and can email me your contact number.

With best wishes,

Matthew Day,
Database Publisher
Nature Publishing Group

Matthew also removed the image from the website (before my answer). So I removed the PDF of the article (a personal copy but I don’t think I could consider it as a self-archived article) from this blog.

From an initial error, I think the Nature Publishing Group reacted correctly.

Published in Nature!

I was very pleased to see my first publication in Nature ⁽¹⁾, the scientific journal with an impact factor of 26! Well, it’s not really what you can expect (especially if you are one of my two mentors): one of my photos on Flickr, representing a rat eating (or praying?), was chosen to illustrate a summary of UK Academy of Medical Sciences report on animal-human chimeras 🙂

Click on the thumbnail above to see the full screenshot

Here is the article full reference: DeWitt, N. “Animal-human chimeras: Summary of UK Academy of Medical Sciences Report” Nature Reports Stem Cells, published online on August, 2nd, 2007.

Note that I don’t know if they completely comply with the photo license since the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 allows them to re-use the photo and do the modifications, provided they give credit (ok) and distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to the CC-by-sa. They are not clearly stating to others the licence terms of their new work …

⁽¹⁾ As Jan Schoones wrote in his comment, it’s not published in Nature itself but in Nature Reports Stem Cells, a journal published by the same company as Nature but which does not have an impact factor! (Edited on August, 20th)