Re: License for Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

["Maria C. PANTELIA" <mcpantel@uci.edu>]

Recently there has been some discussion on Liblicense-l regarding the
licensing agreement issued by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG Project)
at the University of California, Irvine. I would like to offer the
following comments for the sake of clarification.

The TLG is a research center at UC Irvine. Our goal is to produce a
comprehensive digital collection of all Greek works extant from antiquity
to the present time in the original language. Since 1985, our collection
has been disseminated in CD ROM format on the basis of five-year license
agreement.

About a year ago we released a web version and modified our license
agreement to comply with the standards and language required in all
licenses issued by the Regents of the University of California, the legal
owner of the TLG. Our project does not have the authority to make any
changes to our license agreement and any modifications, even the most
minor ones, have to be approved by UC legal counsel, a process which can
take weeks or months at a time. Considering that we are dealing with
hundreds of institutions, it is not practical for us--in fact it is
impossible--to customize our license agreement in each case.

Two months ago and following a request by the University of Kentucky (and
subsequently other state institutions), UC agreed to completely remove the
Governing Law Clause from our license and modify the Indemnification
Clause to meet the concerns of the University of Kentucky and any other
state or private institutions. These changes are fairly standard terms
that, we believe, all universities should be able to accept, especially
since the indemnification now only applies to acts of the particular
institution's employees and only "to the extent permitted by local (state)
law."

During this period we, the TLG, have made every effort to work with
institutions and even find creative ways to work around the problem and
provide access to our data. In the case of the University of Kentucky, UC
agreed 100% to the changes and the specific language requested and we have
implemented those changes to all our contracts (for all institutions,
private or state). We also provided access to our web version to the
University of Kentucky ahead of time in good faith and in anticipation of
the signing of the agreement. We believe we have done as much as we could
do to reach an agreement that protects both institutions in the highly
unlikely event of a legal dispute.

Let me conclude by saying that the TLG project is interested in promoting
scholarship and making its data available to as many people as possible.
Our goal is to produce the best research tool possible for the benefit of
our colleagues in the academia at large. We are not a commercial
enterprise with large resources and we are dealing with the same kinds of
restrictions as all other state institutions.

Maria Pantelia
Associate Professor of Classics
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Director
UC Irvine