British National Corpus - Permission Issue

Permission Issue

The BNC was the first text corpus of its size to be made widely available. This could be attributed to the standard forms of agreement, between rights owners and the Consortium on the one hand, and between corpus users and the Consortium on the other. Intellectual property rights (IPR) owners were sought for their agreement to incorporate their materials in the corpus without any fees and shown the standard licence agreement which is relevant up till today. The acknowledgement with this arrangement may have been influenced by the originality of the concept and the prominence associated to this big idea.

However, there was the problem of keeping the identity of contributors hidden without discrediting the value of their work. Any distinct allusion to the identity of contributors was largely taken down and the alternative of substituting it with a different name had been discussed. Yet this solution of using substitution was seen as being not feasible.

Adding on to the earlier problem was the fact that the contributors had earlier been asked only to incorporate transcribed versions of their speech and not the speech itself. While permission could be sought from initial contributors again, the lack of success in the anonymization process meant that it would be challenging to sought materials from initial contributors again. At the same time, two factors compounded the unwillingness of IPR owners to donate their materials. Firstly, full texts were to be excluded and secondly, there was no motivation for them to disseminate information using the corpus, particularly since the corpus operates on a non-commercial basis.