[od-discuss] Last day for OGL-C feedback

Thu Jan 31 21:01:43 UTC 2013

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:37 AM, Andrew Stott
<andrew.stott at dirdigeng.com> wrote:
> Mike/Herb
>
> Thanks for your work on this.  I'm happy to subscribe to this draft,
> particularly given the timescale.  We should offer to expand on our
> suggestions as needed and to continue to help the Government of Canada on
> the drafting of the licence.

Excellent point, added.

> Three thoughts though:
>
> (1) the domain name issue is a novel one; to the extent that there needs to
> be protection it is already covered by the generic statement on trademarks.

That's a clear way of putting it, tweaked accordingly.

> (2) the complete exclusion of "personal data" raises the issue of personal
> data which is a matter of public record, for instance the names of senior
> officials or the names of Directors in a company registry.  This is also an
> issue in OGL-UK.  Some of these downstream uses may constitute "unfair
> processing" in terms (in the UK) of the Data Protection Act (eg using the
> data for a junk mailing list), but that is a matter for general law not the
> licence.  At the moment the licence (like the OGL) would seem not to cover
> any use of personal data such as published names.

Another good point. I added to the comments in the exemptions section.

> (3) the move of the "endorsement" from condition to exemption is clever.
> However all the existing exemptions are of types of information rather than
> ways of using the information.

Right, the entire exemption section may need to be tweaked to accommodate.

> And CC-BY 3.0 has the "endorsement"
> alongside "attribution" as Restrictions.

Indeed, this has been noted here previously -- namely that if OD 1.2
comes down strongly on such endorsement clauses making a licence
non-open, very widely used ones such as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA should get
an asterisk, at the least. This is fixed in the current CC 4.0 draft.

> BTW s/abscence/absence/

Fixed (also thanks to Stefano and Tariq for noting other typos).

Many thanks,
Mike