RDF data, who owns it?

According to DMOZ management they do because their phony ToU said so:

It would be fine if you submitted your site to DMOZ and requested inclusion but what if your site
one of thousands sites added to DMOZ by editors who are crawling Internet for good sites and
added your site to DMOZ Index without your consent?

People whose sites was listed without their permission never agreed to follow any ToU conditions
including of course content of generic titles and descriptions applied by editors not to mention they
never waived anything because nobody ask them to do so.

Now the questions are:

• how DMOZ management can claim as their own something that no one legally permitted them to use in a first place?
• what legal right DMOZ management has to Copyright somebody else’s properties without owners consent?
• Does DMOZ management have any right to ask RDF data users for attribution given that part of RDF data legally doesn’t belong in DMOZ Index?

Based on facts from above, my question is:
should people who are using RDF data or some links listed in DMOZ Index give DMOZ any attribution?


fastreplies

 

From a legal perspective i would not have a clue and would not even attempt to debate the legalities of using DMOZ RDF. Thats for Lawyers and people smarter than me, to decide.

From a moral perspective.......If the data is good enough to use, then you would have to be a total "slime ball" to use the data without placing some form of acknowledgement (as a thank you for compiling it)

 

There is big difference between “some form of acknowledgment” and Ultimatum.
http://www.dmoz.org/license.html

I’m sure some people won’t have problems to mention that some links in their directory
has been inspired by ODP and even post link to DMOZ but to have that slimy green box
on every page of their site because of few dozens or even hundreds of links amongst
10th of thousands links, which belong to that directory… get real snooky.

I don’t believe DMOZ have any authority to demand attribution considering how ODP
compiled RDF data in a first place.

fastreplies

 

Well i'm taking a wild guess and guessing that you may be one of the people that use the data without attribution??

No need for further comment....I'm not surprised

 

My own directory was initially seeded with ODP data, and I attribute with no problems about that. One interesting thing is that many times my directory comes up in serps ahead of DMOZ and Goog. directory. Not sure exactly why, but I do try to keep it up to date and it's a niche regional dir. If I do all of the work in a cat, then I will often delete the (automatic) attribution. One doesnt' need to attribute the directory structure itself.

 

Without making any wild guesses, just based on fasts we know.

Do you believe that Yahoo, Bing, Google and other Search Engines that has been displaying DMOZ data
on their pages obliged to place attribution on every search results page?

Now, you don’t have to be some legal scholar to express your own believes and all you have to do is
to look at this page http://www.dmoz.org/license.html, read what it says and then give us your opinion.

Can you do that?

fastreplies

 

Also see RZ which explains that editors aren't able to answer fastreplies questions and advises him to contact AOL Legal.

(Sorry for the bump but I missed this thread at the time)

 

And that was exactly what I did but AOL Legal told me that if I have any legal questions,
I should post them in resource-zone.com forum for DMOZ Administrators to answer them and
if Administrators cannot answer them, then they Administrators should contact AOL Legal.

By 'Administrators' AOL Legal Dept. meant you Jim

fastreplies