On 2015 May 17, Egon Willighagen commented:

Like Open Access, "sharing" is a meaningless term if it is not linked to meaningful rights. The problems outlined in this paper result from the fact that their may be a wish to share data but only if it allows you to take back the data. Private, custom data licenses do just that. There is nothing wrong with this kind of sharing, but it must not be confused with Open Data. It must not be confounded with terms like "publicly available", because if it needs a signature, it's not publicly available. That makes the lead of this article quite misleading.

For public or open data, three basic rights are part of the social agreement between the data owner (yes, fact in many countries; database rights, etc) and data user. These rights are: 1. make a copy, 2. make modifications, and 3. reshare (under the same conditions). By using a license (or waiver) that gives this rights automatically to the receiver, then there is no need for signatures. It also allows for anyone to make the mappings that are required to convert one format into another.

On 2015 May 17, Egon Willighagen commented:

Like Open Access, "sharing" is a meaningless term if it is not linked to meaningful rights. The problems outlined in this paper result from the fact that their may be a wish to share data but only if it allows you to take back the data. Private, custom data licenses do just that. There is nothing wrong with this kind of sharing, but it must not be confused with Open Data. It must not be confounded with terms like "publicly available", because if it needs a signature, it's not publicly available. That makes the lead of this article quite misleading.

For public or open data, three basic rights are part of the social agreement between the data owner (yes, fact in many countries; database rights, etc) and data user. These rights are: 1. make a copy, 2. make modifications, and 3. reshare (under the same conditions). By using a license (or waiver) that gives this rights automatically to the receiver, then there is no need for signatures. It also allows for anyone to make the mappings that are required to convert one format into another.