Work field 7: Copyright and ethical questions regarding the use of language resources, Licence models

Participating partners: Institute for the German Language Mannheim

Problems and uncertainties regarding copyright and licences are still standing in the way of a widespread utilisation of language resources. Potential providers of language resources hesitate in making them accessible, because it is not always clear which legal consequences this might have. This does especially apply for corpora, where single texts have been written by more than one author and whose rights are affected in the event of them being published. Besides this, there are ethical implications that might be connected to using some of the resources. One example is transcripts of therapeutic conversations, which are important for empirical dialog research but whose contents might be affecting personal rights.

On a European level, guidelines for a constructive handling of these questions are developed in the CLARIN project. However, due to a nation bound jurisdiction, the set of problems needs a localisation, which should be achieved for German at least rudimentary in this project

The legal situation of some of the questions mentioned above is not always clearly stated. Moreover, these are a matter of judicial research and discussion on its own, and therefore only an evaluation of open questions can be accomplished at that time. These problems can be explored further and more thoroughly by the example of a resource.

In addition, a consultation of participating partners regarding questions about legal licensing will take place. On this basis, exemplary solutions for German resources could be developed in collaboration with external experts.