Licensing

All LDC data are subject to some user license agreement.

Members’ use of LDC data is generally governed by the terms of their membership agreements. Nonmembers who license data from LDC must sign the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members.

Certain LDC data sets are governed by corpus-specific license agreements which supersede the LDC membership agreements and the LDC User Agreement for Non-Members and must therefore be signed by all licensees (members and nonmembers).

License Terms

LDC Not-For-Profit members, government members and nonmember licensees may use LDC data for noncommercial linguistic research and education only. For-profit organizations who are or were LDC members may conduct commercial technology development with LDC data received when the organization was an LDC for-profit member unless use of that data is otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific license agreement. Not-for-profit members, government members and nonmembers, including nonmember for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product or for any commercial purpose.

License Case Study #1: A for-profit organization joins LDC as a for-profit member in the current year. That organization will gain commercial rights to data from the year in which it joined LDC unless any data set is otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific license agreement. Furthermore, while a member in the current year, the organization may license data from closed membership years for commercial use at a reduced license fee. If the organization does not renew its membership for the following year, it still retains ongoing commercial rights to data from the membership year and to any additional data it licensed as a for-profit member. The organization will not have commercial rights to any new data obtained from LDC after its membership year ends.

License Case Study #2: A for-profit organization licenses data from LDC as a nonmember. That organization cannot use LDC data for any commercial purpose. If that organization joins LDC at some future time, it can gain commercial rights to any data already licensed, unless those rights are otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific license agreement. 

Questions concerning licenses for LDC data should be directed to the Membership Office.