Conditions for private cave data on seagrass
From Fs_wiki
Julian Todd pays for the colocated server called seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk, which is administered through [www.mythic-beasts.com] to the tune of a couple of thousand pounds per years. This gives him the right to set conditions on it.
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Why do people keep cave data private?
I don't f***ing know. When asked, it's often evident that people haven't really thought too hard about it. There's an idea that it's a right they are given in law -- a law which has incidentally evolved for the benefit of corporations -- so they must take it or they will lose everything. And these include:
- the right to make lots of money from the survey
- the right to become famous as the author of this wonderful survey
- the right to prevent other people from using your survey to build a better one which you don't think is better
- the right to destroy the data without trace
None of these have any merit.
Why should you make all cave data public?
Because it's right and because it works. The arguments for free software apply exactly to cave data.
You won't make money
The idea that there are riches that will even cover 0.1% of expenses can only be laughed at. The inconvenience of administering and managing private cave data easily wipes out any gains -- or costs -- that are passed on to other cavers. I don't get any money back from writing Tunnel or hosting seagrass, so I know where I stand.
Apart from grants, there are two sources of money paid for cave surveys that ostensibly require ownership of intellectual property to get paid for commercial use.
The first is that your cave survey might be printed in a book which people would buy. There is so little money in books that there is no budget for reprinting your survey among the hundred other that might be there. Chances are that if you tried to charge for it, the author would decide not to put it in, so all you've achieved is made him waste the time of finding you and getting you to agree that he can print it for free. Had you given blanket permission for your cave survey to be printed in any book or magazine in advance, you would have saved this effort.
The second case is you might make a poster of your survey and sell your poster for money. If you made it possible to print copies without buying from you, you'd never make any sales. This one is quite easy to answer. The cost of one-off printing of a decent poster sized poster is so high, and the costs of volume printing is so much lower, that no one would do it.
Collaborative efforts
Most cave surveys are collaborative efforts right from the start because it takes a team of cavers to make a survey, hold the tape measures, and read the instruments. You might have many different cavers going on survey trips. You would be stealing their work from them if you insisted that the data they gathered belonged only to you.
And what happens if one of the people who helped survey your cave years later discovers a extension which branches off from "your" cave? Do they have to get your permission to add these new passages to "your" survey? What if you can't be found or have given up caving? If it is a little extension, do you still think that the survey is your survey? What happens if the extension becomes much longer than the original survey that is yours? Is it still yours because you were there first? You should be adding your survey onto theirs. Would you really want to force them to resurvey all your bits to gain the benefits of sole ownership of the cave survey?
A good license to use for cave surveys is the Creative Commons License 2.5, which permits all use, whether non-profit or commercial, and permits derivative works. Your name stays on it and because it is "share-alike" you have an automatic right of access to everything derived from this survey, including all survey extensions. No one is allowed to start by making a copy of your survey then add bits to it and call this survey their own.
Losing the data
This happens so routinely that it alone is good enough reason to make everything public so there are lots of copies floating around.
Of course maybe all cave data should be destroyed because cave surveying is so fun that no one should be denied the opportunity to do it again and again on the same cave.
When can you keep cave data private?
The short answer is: only during a transitional period.
The conditions for hosting it on seagrass are as follows:
- The owner of the server must get reimbursed for the admin costs for the hosting the data. There will be an annual fee.
- If payment is not forthcoming, the owner of the server has the right to make the data public.
The thinking behind these conditions is that data should remain private for only as long as you care about keeping it private. Once you die or cease to care, it should fall into public hands. At present, it's the wrong way around -- data remains private and difficult to access if you don't care about it. This must change.
The reason for paying for it is three-fold. First, it stops you freeloading off other people's donations. Second, it proves that you care enough about keeping it private -- say, until you have sold all your posters or published that book. Third, it gives a small financial incentive to make something public and therefore helps to clarify your thinking about it. No longer do you have to argue that you might make some money, no matter how little, from the survey, and are therefore are justified in keeping it private. Now you have to argue that you will make at least ten pounds a year from it.
