[obs-tap] Data Rights

[Rob Seaman]

On Mar 28, 2011, at 3:14 AM, Petr Skoda wrote:

> 1) the format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss is not ISO 8601 but a restricted representation of ISO - and the same hold what I said earlier about SSAP (e.g. we should force the "T" instead of space, following rather the limits of RFC  3339.

IVOA might borrow language from FITS:

	http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/fitsy2k.html

The more fundamental question is how the likely redefinition of UTC will affect IVOA and broader astronomical issues.  STC addresses complex science requirements, but timekeeping is also a logistical issue.

> The nature of proprietary data can be different - some are kept secret for ever as the observatory is private (e.g. Keck)  The government-funded data shoudl be published after some time so they will become public. But some organizations may have strict policy on proprietary period (e.g. 1 year and then the data may be released) some may decide aftetr some push ;-) to release certain data (when no one from the original PI's has interested in them) etc ...

Indeed.  More fundamental yet is the theory of IP under which each organization operates.  Most astronomical institutions appear to assert (typically only implicitly) copyright "ownership" over the data generated by their telescopes, pipelines, etc.  In fact, enforcing a proprietary period requires that data not immediately flow into the public domain.

However, there is a real question of whether digital scientific data are copyrightable in the first place.  Copyright protects the expression of an idea - not the idea itself. Contrast with photographic plates.  Observatories clearly owned the physical expression of analog data, and this was sufficient to control the later uses of those data.  I won't belabor the quite different issues applying to digital data.  Ask yourself, however, whether your own institution has a clear vision of modern astronomical data rights issues.

Rob