Release legacy data under CC BY 4.0

LICENSE

@@ -1,145 +1,15 @@
-WebChain Academic Research License v1.0
+WebChain Dataset License
 
 Copyright (c) 2026 Fan Sicheng and the WebChain authors.
-All rights reserved.
 
-This license governs access to and use of the WebChain dataset and any associated files,
-including but not limited to raw records, screenshots, metadata, annotations, processed
-Parquet files, and accompanying documentation (collectively, the "Dataset").
+The WebChain dataset and its accompanying documentation are licensed under
+the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
 
-By downloading, accessing, or using any part of the Dataset, you agree to the terms of
-this license.
+The permissions, conditions, attribution requirements, disclaimers, and other
+terms are defined by the official license text linked below.
 
-1. Definitions
+Full legal code:
+https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
 
-"Academic Use" means non-commercial use by a university, research institute, school,
-student, instructor, or other educational or scholarly organization, solely for research,
-teaching, academic evaluation, or publication.
-
-"Commercial Use" means any use by or for a commercial entity, or any use intended for
-commercial advantage, revenue generation, product development, internal business
-operations, paid services, model commercialization, or use in support of commercial
-decision-making.
-
-"Derivative Materials" means any modified version of the Dataset, any subset of the
-Dataset, any reformatting of the Dataset, and any models, annotations, benchmarks, or
-other artifacts created by substantially using the Dataset, except that trained model
-weights are not themselves considered copies of the Dataset.
-
-2. Grant of License
-
-Subject to your compliance with this license, the authors grant you a limited,
-non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use
-the Dataset solely for Academic Use.
-
-No rights are granted for Commercial Use under this license.
-
-3. Permitted Uses
-
-You may, for Academic Use only:
-
-a. download, access, and locally store the Dataset;
-b. analyze, benchmark, and evaluate the Dataset;
-c. use the Dataset to train, fine-tune, or evaluate research models;
-d. publish academic papers or scholarly reports describing results obtained using the Dataset;
-e. create limited Derivative Materials for Academic Use, provided they remain subject to
-   restrictions no less protective than those in this license.
-
-4. Restrictions
-
-You may not, unless you first obtain separate written permission from the authors:
-
-a. use the Dataset for any Commercial Use;
-b. sell, rent, sublicense, lease, distribute for a fee, or otherwise monetize the Dataset;
-c. mirror, republish, or redistribute the full Dataset on another public host, website,
-   repository, torrent, or storage service;
-d. redistribute substantial portions of raw screenshots, raw records, or processed files
-   except as strictly necessary for non-commercial academic collaboration with recipients
-   who are bound by terms at least as restrictive as this license;
-e. use the Dataset to identify, re-identify, profile, target, or infer information about
-   any real person;
-f. use the Dataset in any manner that violates applicable law, website terms, privacy
-   obligations, or platform rules;
-g. remove, alter, or obscure copyright, attribution, access notices, or license notices;
-h. falsely imply that the authors endorse you, your institution, your product, or your use.
-
-5. Privacy, Safety, and Responsible Use
-
-The Dataset is provided for responsible research release. You must not attempt to recover
-or infer personally identifiable information, credentials, account secrets, or other
-sensitive information from the Dataset.
-
-If you discover any privacy, redaction, safety, legal, or policy issue in the Dataset,
-you must promptly stop using the affected portion and notify the authors.
-
-6. Access Control
-
-The Dataset may be distributed through access-controlled channels, including gated access
-mechanisms. Approval to access the Dataset may be granted or denied at the authors'
-discretion. Access approval does not waive or modify any term of this license.
-
-7. Attribution
-
-Any publication, report, presentation, model card, benchmark description, or other public
-output that makes material use of the Dataset must give appropriate academic citation to
-the WebChain paper and should acknowledge the Dataset by name.
-
-Suggested citation:
-
-Fan, Sicheng, Rui Wan, Yifei Leng, Gaoning Liang, Li Ling, Yanyi Shang, and Dehan Kong.
-"WebChain: A Large-Scale Human-Annotated Dataset of Real-World Web Interaction Traces."
-arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05295, 2026.
-
-8. Derivative Materials and Sharing
-
-You may share limited Derivative Materials only for Academic Use and only if:
-a. the sharing is non-commercial;
-b. recipients are informed that the source material is derived from WebChain;
-c. recipients are bound by terms no less restrictive than this license; and
-d. the shared materials do not expose raw content in a way that undermines the access
-   controls or responsible release intent of the Dataset.
-
-For the avoidance of doubt, sharing the complete Dataset, or any release that is
-functionally equivalent to the complete Dataset, is not permitted without separate written
-permission from the authors.
-
-9. No Warranty
-
-THE DATASET IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
-OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
-PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR ERROR-FREE OPERATION.
-
-The authors do not warrant that the Dataset is free of omissions, interruptions,
-formatting inconsistencies, website-dependent artifacts, or redaction errors.
-
-10. Limitation of Liability
-
-TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE AUTHORS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR
-ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES, OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
-FROM, OUT OF, OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE DATASET OR THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE
-DATASET.
-
-11. Termination
-
-This license automatically terminates if you fail to comply with any term of this
-license. Upon termination, you must cease use of the Dataset and delete all copies of the
-Dataset in your possession or control, except to the extent retention is required by law.
-
-The authors reserve the right to revoke access to the Dataset for violation of these
-terms, misuse, safety concerns, legal concerns, or responsible-release concerns.
-
-12. Governing Terms
-
-This license constitutes the entire agreement between you and the authors with respect to
-the Dataset, unless separate written terms are agreed for Commercial Use.
-
-If any provision of this license is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions will
-remain in full force to the maximum extent permitted by law.
-
-13. Commercial Licensing Contact
-
-For commercial licensing or other permission requests, contact:
-
-Fan Sicheng
-Email: sicheng_fan@foxmail.com
-Hugging Face repository: Fan-Sicheng/WebChain
+License summary:
+https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

README.md

@@ -1,9 +1,7 @@
 ---
 pretty_name: WebChain
-license: other
-license_name: webchain-academic-research-license-v1.0
+license: cc-by-4.0
 license_link: LICENSE
-gated: true
 size_categories:
   - 10K<n<100K
 tags:
@@ -16,41 +14,6 @@ tags:
   - accessibility-tree
   - screenshot
   - reinforcement-learning
-extra_gated_heading: Request access to WebChain
-extra_gated_description: Academic and educational use is free upon approval. Commercial use requires a separate license agreement from the authors.
-extra_gated_button_content: Submit access request
-extra_gated_prompt: By submitting this request, you confirm that the information you provide is accurate, that you will use the dataset only under the LICENSE terms, and that any commercial use requires separate written permission from the authors.
-extra_gated_fields:
-
-  Full Name:
-    type: text
-
-  Organization Type:
-    type: select
-    options:
-      - "Academic / University Research Lab"
-      - "Non-profit Research Institute"
-      - "Independent Researcher / Open Source Contributor"
-      - "Company employee — personal learning only (no work use)"
-      - "Company / Commercial use ⚠️ Please email sicheng_fan@foxmail.com instead"
-
-  Organization Name + Homepage URL:
-    type: text
-    description: "e.g., 'Stanford NLP Group, https://nlp.stanford.edu'. We may verify."
-
-  Supervisor / Manager Name + Verifiable Contact:
-    type: text
-    description: "e.g., 'Prof. Chris Manning, manning@stanford.edu'. Required for verification."
-
-  Intended Use (2-3 sentences, please be specific):
-    type: text
-    description: "e.g., 'Pretraining a 3B agent model for ICLR 2027 submission on long-horizon planning; weights to be released under MIT.'"
-
-  I confirm my use is strictly non-commercial:
-    type: checkbox
-
-  I agree to cite WebChain in any publications and not redistribute raw data:
-    type: checkbox
 ---
 
 # WebChain
@@ -59,15 +22,9 @@ WebChain is a large-scale, human-annotated dataset of real-world web interaction
 
 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05295
 
-## Access policy
+## Open access and license
 
-This repository is **publicly visible but access-gated**.
-
-- **Academic and educational use**: free upon approval.
-- **Commercial use**: not automatically permitted. Please contact the authors to obtain a separate commercial license.
-- **All users** must submit an access request through the Hugging Face gating form.
-
-Access is granted on a **case-by-case basis**. Approval is generally intended for researchers, students, and educators using the data for non-commercial research or teaching.
+WebChain is released under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](LICENSE). See the license and its [official legal code](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode) for the applicable permissions and attribution requirements. This repository is public and ungated.
 
 ## What is included
 
@@ -158,7 +115,7 @@ The raw folders are released as downloadable research artifacts and may require
 from datasets import load_dataset
 
 # Example: read all parquet shards in the higher-fidelity release
-hf_repo = "computer-use-agent-Lab/WebChain"
+hf_repo = "webagentlab/webchain-legacy"
 
 dataset = load_dataset(
     "parquet",
@@ -185,9 +142,9 @@ print(sample.head())
 print(sample.columns.tolist())
 ```
 
-### Option C: access raw files after approval
+### Option C: access raw files
 
-After approval, you can clone or download the repository and work directly with:
+You can clone or download the repository and work directly with:
 
 - `raw/json/` for raw structured records
 - `raw/img/` for viewport images
@@ -219,8 +176,7 @@ You agree not to:
 
 - attempt to re-identify individuals from the dataset;
 - use the dataset in ways that violate privacy, platform rules, or applicable law;
-- redistribute the dataset outside the scope permitted by the LICENSE;
-- use the dataset commercially without separate written permission.
+- use or redistribute the dataset contrary to the LICENSE.
 
 Please report any privacy, redaction, or policy issue to the maintainers.
 
@@ -239,13 +195,11 @@ If you use WebChain in your work, please cite:
 
 ## Contact
 
-For academic access requests, please use the Hugging Face request form.
-
-For **commercial licensing**, please contact:
+For questions, please contact:
 
 - **Fan Sicheng**
 - **sicheng_fan@foxmail.com**
 
 ## Acknowledgements
 
-We thank the annotators, collaborators, and institutions who supported the creation and release of WebChain.
+We thank the annotators, collaborators, and institutions who supported the creation and release of WebChain.