Hi,

A colleauge of mine just pointed me to a detail of the court decision in
the case Google vs. Oracle. The Suppreme Court of the United States
ruled that reimplementation of Java API is no copyright violation but
allowed at least under fair use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

The opinion of the Court contains a remarkable section on page 6:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

"The second, less obvious, function is to reflect the way in
which Java’s creators have divided the potential world of
different tasks into an actual world, i.e., precisely which set
of potentially millions of different tasks we want to have
our Java-based computer systems perform and how we
want those tasks arranged and grouped. In this sense, the
declaring code performs an organizational function. It determines the
structure of the task library that Java’s creators have decided to
build. To understand this organizational system, think of the Dewey
Decimal System that categorizes books into an accessible system or a
travel guide that arranges a city’s attractions into different categories"

Following this argument the Dewey Decimal System can be used as free as
the Java API. I think that we (library developers) already assumed for
specification of data formats, ontologies and data models but it also
applies to other kinds of knowledge organization systems (classification
schemes, thesauri, gazetteers...) including DDC. By the way if you know
systems not covered in BARTOC.org yet, please let the editors know so we
will add them!

I doubt that we can share the raw MARC data of DDC with all of its
details, but the class hierarchy, notations and headings (without
limitation of depth!) can be used freely as far as I understand the
court. Or am I missing something?

Cheers
Jakob

--
Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-31031, http://www.gbv.de/