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

Thu Jan 10 22:08:19 UTC 2013

Thanks guys. We'll relate these evaluations to our contacts at the EC.

All the best,

Jonathan

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>wrote:

> 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.htmsays
>
> "© 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
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
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