Both developers and users of CLARIN-D must contend with a variety of legal issues and challenges. The overriding message for now is that everyone should make legal decisions in communication with their institutions, directors, institutional lawyers, and the CLARIN-D legal help desk.

The goal of the legal help desk is to provide useful legal information to scientists so that they and their institutes may make better informed decisions. The help desk is constantly updating it's legal information platform that serves as an evolving best practices guide for researchers and developers. It covers issues relating to licenses, legal implications for data collection (e.g. speech, text, etc.), legal issues for resource creation (building corpora from various works, including online texts and online forums), and legal issues for tools (e.g. can I have them run in a data center?).

Additionally, the legal help desk provides extensive written memos, plus email and telephone support, on these and other cutting-edge issues in copyright, privacy law, and other areas that affect language technology. 

Contact the legal help desk by email via its staff at: