[od-discuss] Are EC's legal notices for the new EC data portal OpenDefinition compliant?

Thu Jan 10 17:07:45 UTC 2013

Hi Jonathan,

It looks to me that the Eurostat Copyright Policy (link 3 in your list)
would not be considered open because of the non-commerical use restriction.

The Europa Legal Notice I am not sure about.  It refers to the Commission
Decision, which it seems to me isn't a license in itself, but rather is a
policy to guide publishers.  So, the only line I see that relates to
granting permission is the text in the body of the Europa Legal Notice that
reads "Reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. ".  If
that's the whole license then that's pretty simple and I think since it
clearly has one restriction, which is attribution, which is allowed under
the definition.  My preference would be to see this more explicitly refer
to the user, with a statement like "You may.... "... but that's probably
just me.

Having said that, the Europa Legal Notice does say that users must refer to
the legal notices of the individual datasets, so users are not really
assured of much just because this legal notice is attached.  There is
more diligence required.  Looking at a few places where this notice is used
though it seems that there are no further legal notices on at least some of
them.

So, my question would be is a legal notice of this kind considered a
license?  Is it actually granting anything?

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 7:54 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As some of you may have seen, the EC recently released a new data portal
> for datasets generated and collected by European bodies [1].
>
> In addition to CC-BY there are two other legal noticed in effect, the
> general Europa Legal Notice [2] and the Eurostat Copyright Policy [3].
>
> I'd love to hear whether people think these are compliant with
> OpenDefinition. I assume the first definitely is (it seems to be a simple
> attribution style license). But some people have raised questions about the
> Eurostat Copyright notice.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Jonathan
>
> [1] http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/data/
> [2] http://ec.europa.eu/geninfo/legal_notices_en.htm
> [3]
> http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/about_eurostat/policies/copyright_licence_policy
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> | @okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
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-- 
Herb Lainchbury
Dynamic Solutions Inc.
www.dynamic-solutions.com
http://twitter.com/herblainchbury
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