[od-discuss] introduction

Tue Aug 24 15:00:12 UTC 2010

A quick thought on point 8:

On 17 Aug 2010, at 15:02, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> The one point I anticipate that OKF might have slightly different
> approach for is point 8. on licensing -- especially regarding
> Attribution. E.g. is CC-BY acceptable for government documents, or is
> it public domain or the highway? While US Federal government is easy,
> will all state/local government relinquish rights for gov data in US?
> In EU there are quite strong traditions of copyright in government
> data. E.g. in UK lots is released under very permissive
> attribution-only license, and we would be keen to call that 'open'
> still.
> 
> What do you think? Part of my motivation for a new set of principles
> for open government data is because the original 8 are quite US
> centric, particularly regarding licenses...

Even in the US, for federal government works, IP rights and legal issues come up with databases.  A license, even if it is a "Public Domain Certification" or a legal tool to dedicate work (such as CC0 or the PDDL), is critical to show the database is in the public domain in order for users to have confidence in the legal rights they are acquiring with the database.  This is especially true as I believe that even US federal works can have copyright *outside the US, though I'm not clear that they ever assert this in practice.

So I'd suggest that point 8 be "Public domain" or at least a recommendation that the databases come "rights free" as a license may very well be necessary (and so "license free" doesn't capture the aim).

Thanks!

~Jordan

> 
> All the best,
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Tom Lee <tlee at sunlightfoundation.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello all -- just a quick note to introduce myself.  I'm Tom Lee, director
>>> of Sunlight Labs, the technical arm of the Sunlight Foundation.  I'm looking
>>> forward to being a part of this important discussion, and hope that you'll
>>> all feel free to reach out to me individually if there's some way that I or
>>> Sunlight can be of help to you.
>> 
>> I reach out!
>>> 
>>> Rufus has already posted our just-released set of ten open data principles
>>> (http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/)
>>> to this list, so perhaps I ought to begin by mentioning it. First: I'd be
>>> glad to hear any thoughts or suggestions for improvement that it might
>>> prompt.  We're offering it in the spirit of evolutionary enhancement of work
>>> that Sunlight had previously participated in -- a necessary update to a tool
>>> we'd already been using.  Our experience lobbying the government has
>>> convinced us that achieving openness is more about fostering a norm than
>>> about finalizing a spec, which makes us less worried about the dangers of
>>> proliferating standards, so long as they're broadly in agreement (though I
>>> certainly understand and respect the fact that others may disagree).
>> 
>> I agree with all of this. I think your principles are at the right level and
>> (until I have had time to think more) seem reasonably comprehensive.  You
>> are probably aware of our work on the Panton Principles
>> (http://pantonprinciples.org/ ) for Scientific Data which have a slightly
>> different emphasis (partly beacuse of the different approach to publishing
>> science). I think they interleave well with yours (and could, for example,
>> work for government scientific data).
>> 
>> We felt it important to get principles rather than hard rules (licences,
>> standards) and I agree about trying to foster norms. What is clear (at least
>> in science) is that the practice of data publication has a lot or wrinkles
>> that are not present in publishing manuscripts/documents. You allude to some
>> of them - open software for reading, for example. Complex data sets are
>> often put together purely for the use of an initially closed community and
>> then it becomes difficult to make them available more widely.  So an
>> additional principle might be to plan for distribution when the data set is
>> conceived. Of course that isn't always possible.
>> 
>> The details matter and so I have drafted a set of discussion papers for
>> various aspects of Open Data - the Panton Papers - which anyone is welcome
>> to hack. I think any of these principle-based approaches will need a lot of
>> supporting material.
>> 
>> P.
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Tom
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Peter Murray-Rust
>> Reader in Molecular Informatics
>> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
>> University of Cambridge
>> CB2 1EW, UK
>> +44-1223-763069
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Gray
> 
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
> 
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
> 
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____
Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM

More at: <http://www.jordanhatcher.com>
Co-founder:  <http://www.opendatacommons.org>
Open Knowledge: <http://www.okfn.org/>