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

Thu Jan 10 18:50:58 UTC 2013

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

"In effect" is kind of vague. AFAICT, there are datasets under CC-BY,
datasets under the Europa Legal Notice, datasets under the Eurostat
Copyright Policy, and then there's the rest of the site besides the
datasets themselves, which would be under the Europa Legal Notice.

Datasets are labeled, eg

CC BY http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/data/dataset/tKTZJMKxkcTKAPLvKninnQ
ELN http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/data/dataset/WyiRNr2TYGsWp6xkq9A
ECP http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/data/dataset/00YYPa7FUadFAd4HH4quTw

Vast majority of currently available datasets must be ECP per
http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/data/publisher

BTW, I tried to discover all licenses used for datasets on the portal,
but it looks like license is tracked by the CMS, not in their
triplestore; a query for unique predicates turns up nothing related:

http://open-data.europa.eu/open-data/sparql?default-graph-uri=&query=select+distinct+%3Fp+where+{%3Fs+%3Fp+%3Fo}+LIMIT+1000&format=text%2Fhtml&timeout=0&debug=on

That's too bad.

> 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).

AFAICT yes, see below.

> But some people have raised questions about the
> Eurostat Copyright notice.

There really isn't anything to question, is there? It's unambiguously non-Open.

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Timothy Vollmer
<tvol at creativecommons.org> wrote:
> The open data portal relies on the reuse decision for Commission documents
> as its "license."

I'm not sure about that. http://ec.europa.eu/geninfo/legal_notices_en.htm says

"© European Union, 1995-2012

Reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The reuse
policy of the European Commission is implemented by a Decision of 12
December 2011 .

The general principle of reuse can be subject to conditions which may
be specified in individual copyright notices. Therefore users are
advised to refer to the copyright notices of the individual websites
maintained under Europa and of the individual documents. Reuse is not
applicable to documents subject to intellectual property rights of
third parties."

It would make more sense if it read

"... Reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The
reuse policy of the European Commission implements a Decision of 12
December 2011 ..."

As the Decision isn't a license, but rather a policy for entities
subject to it to implement. Do I misunderstand?

> That decision [1] includes a provision in Article 6 that
> requires:
>
>> (b) the obligation not to distort the original meaning or message of the
>> documents;

It doesn't require an implementation to require such a term; it allows
a implementation to, as a possible condition on:

"ments shall be made available for reuse without
application unless otherwise specified and without restrictions
or, where appropriate, an open licence or disclaimer setting out
conditions explaining the rights of reusers."

I'd guess "Reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged."
is such a thing, with no conditions other than source acknowledgement.
That seems pretty unambiguously Open.

Mike