From the very beginning, ELRA has come across all types of legal issues that arise when exchanging and sharing Language Resources. The association has devoted huge efforts to streamline the licensing processes while continuously monitoring the impacts of regulation changes on the HLT community activities and trying to liaise with all the institutions involved for common actions. The first major step was to come up with a few licenses for both the research and the industrial sectors to use the resources available in the ELRA catalogue. Recently, its strong involvement in the META-SHARE infrastructure focused on designing and drafting a small set of licenses, inspired by ELRA licenses but also accounting for the new trends of permissive licenses and free resources, represented in particular by the Creative Commons.

To allow an easy understanding of the various licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources (ELRA’s, META-SHARE’s, Creative Commons’, etc.), ELRA has developed a License Wizard to help the right-holders share/distribute their resources under the appropriate license. It also aims to be exploited by users to better understand the legal obligations that apply in various licensing situations.

This work was initiated in the Meta-Share initiative within the Meta-Net Network of Excellence. In Deliverable 6.1.3 META-SHARE: Licenses, Legal, IPR and Licensing Issues, a number of legal features were extracted from different existing licenses and considered as comparable features between those licenses.