Guide to Public Geodata Licensing

This is an outline draft of what is intended to be a guide to open geodata licensing options and current precedents, written to help public administrations choose or design an open license for their data.

It is inspired by the Open Knowledge Foundation's Guide to Open Data Licensing.

Introduction

• Informative, not normative
• Collective and growing guidelines

Open License Concept

The concept of "open licensing" under discussion originates in Free Software. A person or organisation makes a work available under a copyright license with certain restraints which do not restrict access to, reuse of or redistribution of the work. There are many different licenses and license styles to choose from. For many it is enough to say a work of software is open if it uses a license that is described by the OSI Open Source Definition

The Open Definition offers the same service for open data licenses. The aim is to make it clear what the aims are in "open licensing" a work, as well as what the results can be.

Data Licensing Styles

Copyright

Non-Commercial constraints

(each summarised with pros and cons, references at the end)

Existing Open Licenses by Country

Canada

• Manitoba Land Inititative - https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/ Custom License: Despite the data is Crown Copyright, all use, including commercial use is free of cost. A clause prohibits the sale of data without "added value" modification.

References

• EDINA paper in particular
• highlights of OSM-legal-talk
• a lot of other mailing list posts, blog entries, etc

See Also

• Geodata Licensing
• Geodata Committee