Copyright Agreement

To ensure our projects' long-term sustainability, privacy of users, and the rights of partners, we need some additional rules besides e.g. "this project is published under GPL".  

1. Definitions
   1. Operator: Dr. Joeran Beel, Zur Salzhaube 3a, 31832 Springe, Germany.
   2. These rules apply to the contribution to projects that you participate in under supervision of the operator, but in particular to:
      
      1. Docear and all sub-projects (e.g. Docear4Word and PDF Inspector)
         http://www.docear.org/ 
         https://github.com/Docear 
      2. Mr-DLib
         http://mr-dlib.org/ 
         https://github.com/Mr-DLib/ 
   3. Partners: Partners are organizations or individuals that submit content to a project (e.g. documents to be recommended via Mr. DLib) or use the services of the project (e.g. the recommender system). 
   4. Users: Users are individuals that use a project (e.g. receive recommendations) either directly or through a partner.
   5. Contribution: A contribution is any kind of data or information that is submitted to the project. This includes but is not limited to source code, texts, emails, binaries, images/logos/photos, sound/music, ideas, and statistical data.
   6. Contributor: Any person who submits a contribution.
   7. Active contributor: Any contributor who submitted a contribution within the past 90 days.
   8. Confidential data and information: This is information and data that is stored in non-public places (e.g. non-public pages in the WIKI, non-public code repositories, emails, or data on the project's server) or shared orally. There may be different types of confidential data and information. For instance, in the Mr. DLib project there is a) content of partners, whereas the partners usually signed contracts to receive the content from third parties and the contracts typically do not allow our partners (or us) to freely distribute the content b) user-specific data (e.g. name, email addresses, lists of documents in their collections) c) statistics or log-files e.g. about the effectiveness of delivered recommendations or errors on the servers d) server access details such as log-in data, IP addresses, billing information e) source code that might reveal some of the previously mentioned information (e.g. a parser for a partner's content might contain some confidential information about a partner). 
   9. We use the terms data and information interchangeably. 
2. Copyright
   The general idea is that whatever you contribute to a project can be used by both you and the operator in the future in whatever way you or the operator want. This means: 
   
   1. You keep the full rights on your own contributions to use them however you like. For instance, you may use your own contributions in any other project, publish the contribution wherever you want, under which licence you want.
      1. This rule also applies if you are being paid to make the contribution, e.g. as student worker, intern or PhD student (unless you signed another contract that says something different).
      2. This rule does not apply if you contribute confidential data or information (e.g. a parser for a specific partner or some other source code that is not published, see section 1). In that case you may use the contribution not outside the project, i.e. you may not use the contribution in other projects, nor publish it elsewhere. This rule is necessary to protect the rights of our partners and users. 
   2. You have the right to use others' contributions only in the same way as any other person not being affiliated with the project would be allowed to do it. For instance, if another contributor contributes source code to a project under the GPL licence, you are free to use this contribution in other projects under the GPL licence, but not under any other licence. This also means that if someone contributes confidential data or information, you are generally not allowed to use this contribution in other projects. 
   3. You grant the non-exclusive royalty-free permanent world-wide right to the operator to use your contribution in any way the operator wants. This includes, for instance, that the operator may modify your contributions, remove your contribution from the project, sell it, change the licence of your contributions, and use the contribution in other projects. This is important to guarantee the long-term sustainability of the project (for instance, if the licence of Mr. DLib should be changed from GPL to Apache, every single contributor would have to agree and if someone does not agree the further development would be blocked or the corresponding contribution would have to be re-done by some other contributor). 
   4. Both the contributor and operator may give/transfer/sell their rights (or parts of them) to any other individual or organization.  
3. Privacy
   
   1. You may only access/store/copy confidential data that you need for your own contribution. For instance, if you are planning to make a new logo, you may not access or copy any content of our partners. If you are developing a recommendation approach specific to one partner, you may only access the content of that specific partner, as far as technically feasible. 
   2. You may share confidential data and information only with other active contributors who need the data for their own contribution. 
   3. Once you are no active contributor any more, you must delete any copies of any confidential data and information within 30 days.
   4. If you contribute to a project with the purpose of doing some research (and publishing the results):
      1. clarify in advance with the operator what kind of information you later want to publish. Generally, you may publish only aggregated and anonymous information about users and partners, unless you have the explicit permission to do otherwise. For instance, you are not allowed to publish users' personal details or information such as click-rates, number of users, or details of the content for a specific partner. However, you are allowed to publish anonymized information such as "Partner A has a CTR of 3% and partner B of 2%" as long as you do not provide any information that make it easy to find out who "partner A" actually is.
      2. You do not need to delete data that was collected as part of your research, and you can use all collected data also for further research, even if you are no active contributor any more.