Re: Ownership of RIPE Database
On Wed, 19 Aug 92 19:56:20 +0200 you said:
The RARE Executive is currently conducting research into "ownership" issues of the RIPE Network Management Database. This research has been requested by the RARE CoA. The NCC has been asked to help with the research. From my personal experience this has two parts:
- preventing abuse of the database
I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about the database to see what kind of abuses might take place. Well, companies might compile a list of networkers for targetting advertisments but I don't think this would warrant special precautions. What do they do in the US with their comparable data ?
- ownership of a collection of data made by collaborative effort which is not quite a "collaborative work"
If there is an owner this must be RIPE since I assume the data is submitted to RIPE on a non-exclusive basis by the NIC/NOCs. However, I strongly believe that except if potential abuses can be identified the database should be public. If somehow the database becomes protected there may arise a market for 'illegal' copies which quite likely would soon be outdated. As long at the original version is always accessible the risk or people floating incorrect information will be smaller. Btw. the BITEARN NODES table which also contains routing and personal information has always been public.
Of course when formalising this the issue of data protection legislation regularly pops up as well.
Perhaps it would be worth while to check the Dutch legislation on any possibly needed procedures. Checking all European legislation on rules for directories and databases is a major project which as far as I understand has not been undertaken by our community. I think this is way beyond what RIPE should get into, but perhaps COSINE should have done it or it could become a RARE project. Regards/ Frode
Do we really know what the RARE CoA really mean by this question? What are the issues we/they need to resolve? I attended a workshop here in Sweden on teh proposal from the CEC on "Databases protection". Apart from the fact that there were no concrete resultes, the findings were interesting: - are we protecting the data or the sourcecode? - are we protecting the work to gather the info and present it in a new medium and collection? - The added value? - there are normal legal protection for publizised material under most Europena laws already. books,m usic et c. The need for protection of a database is in my opinion to protect an investment in work effort or "value" - maps or other hard work against replication and "resell". The question is what the purpose is for the RIPE database? To support network operations and contacts! Maybe the right to use this databse should be granted to a membership? "Internet Society?" The rules for usage could then be limited to support networking contacts, but take away marketing and such things. --mats
participants (2)
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Frode Greisen -
matsb@sics.se