RE: SUO: RE: Cyc Upper Ontology offer
Doug makes a good point:
The intent is not for Cycorp to claim credit for Aristotle's work,
but rather to avoid a situation where someone runs some simple
mechanical transformation of our axioms, producing a set of
equivalent ones for which they then take credit. (Normal
copyright protection does not protect against such "semantic"
plaigarism, since the character-by-character appearance of
the axioms would be different from the form in which we supplied
them, even if all the "adapter" did was alter the names of the
predicates and variables in some systematic manner.)
===
Surely, if one does such an automatic translation, then Cyc deserves
credit. A grayer area which I would be interested in Doug'v view on, is
when someone has on their own developed axioms which happen to be
the same as those in Cyc. I have not read the legalese. If this is strictly
forbidden, it seems problematic. I think Doug is more likely to be concerned
about the case when Cyc was genuinely the source of the material being used.
Mike Uschold
------------
From owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org Fri Mar 16 14:14:03 2001
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Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:10:35 -0600
To: "Horn, Graham" <graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
From: Doug Lenat <doug@cyc.com>
Subject: RE: SUO: RE: Cyc Upper Ontology offer
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Graham,
The intent is not for Cycorp to claim credit for Aristotle's work,
but rather to avoid a situation where someone runs some simple
mechanical transformation of our axioms, producing a set of
equivalent ones for which they then take credit. (Normal
copyright protection does not protect against such "semantic"
plaigarism, since the character-by-character appearance of
the axioms would be different from the form in which we supplied
them, even if all the "adapter" did was alter the names of the
predicates and variables in some systematic manner.)
Since we aren't asking for royalties or license fees, I expect
there shouldn't be much objection to giving us the requested
citation/acknowledgement. I'm sure you would expect the same
in the reverse situation: i.e., you've written a corpus of 30,000
axioms and some fellow scientist asks you for a copy, and you
supply it, and they then adapt and built upon it for their
work (academic or commercial); then surely in that situation
it would be wrong for them not to credit your contribution.
Regards,
Doug
At 04:13 PM 3/16/01 +1100, Horn, Graham wrote:
><snip> Notice that the agreement requires that any use of any axioms which
>are *logically equivalent* to any part of Cyc, even if translated into any
>other natural or artificial language, must be credited to Cycorp. This means
>that if one uses any part of the Cyc upper ontology and if they also assert
>that, say, every relation is a thing, or that spatial containment is
>transitive, then they must acknowledge that Cycorp owns the copyright to
>that assertion, even if it is made in, say, EPISTLE, or even in English, and
>even if they had said it before in other places; in fact, even if Aristotle
>had said it before. </snip>
>
>Wow!
> . Maybe not so marvellous after all. I presume this means
>there is at least considerable negotiations in front of us before we can
>even look at taking up Cyc.
>
> . I would suggest Cyc would get considerable advantage by
>being adopted by the SUO. I would hope that would make it attractive for
>them to retract this condition. I presume the clause would be totally
>unacceptable to all of us, as well as the IEEE.
>
> . The offer did seem too good to be true. Maybe it was.
>
>
>
>Cheers Graham Horn
>National Data Standards Unit
>Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
>================================================
>Phone: 02.6244.1094
>Fax: 02.6244.1199
>Email: Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
>
>
=============================================================
Dr. Douglas B. Lenat phone: 512-342-4001
Cycorp, Suite 100 fax: 512-342-4040
3721 Executive Center Drive email: lenat@cyc.com
Austin, TX 78731 web: <http://www.cyc.com>
=============================================================