April 2011 Newsletter
Friday, April 15, 2011
New Corpora
Broadcast News Lattices
NIST/USF Evaluation Resources for the VACE Program - Meeting Data Training Set Part 2
Announcements
Membership Mailbag - Commercial Licenses and LDC Data
LDC's Membership office responds to thousands of emailed queries a year, and, over time, we've noticed that some questions tend to crop up with regularity. To address the questions that you, our data users, have asked, we'd like to continue our periodic Membership Mailbag series of newsletter articles. This month, we'll review how to obtain a commercial license to LDC data.
Our non-member research licenses permit non-commercial linguistic education and research use of data. Not-for-profit members and non-members, including non-member commercial 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. To gain commercial rights to data, an organization must join LDC as a for-profit member. For-profit members gain commercial rights to data from the year joined unless that right is otherwise restricted by a corpus-specific user license. Furthermore, for-profit members can license data for commercial use from closed Membership Years at the Reduced Licensing Fee. If membership is not renewed for the following year, the organization still retains ongoing commercial rights to data licensed as a For-Profit member and any data from the Membership Year. Note that the organization will not have a commercial license to any new data obtained after the Membership Year has ended, unless membership is renewed.
Simply put – organizations who have not signed LDC’s for-profit membership agreement and paid membership fees do not have a commercial license to any LDC data.
In the case of a handful of corpora, such as American National Corpus (ANC) Second Release (LDC2005T35), Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer Version 2.0 (LDC2004L02), CELEX2 (LDC96L14) and all CSLU corpora, commercial licenses must be obtained separately from the owners of the data even if an organization is a for-profit member. A full list of corpus-specific user licenses can be found on our License Agreements page.
Got a question? About LDC data? Forward it to
. The answer may appear in a future Membership Mailbag article.