[od-discuss] OGL-Alberta v2.0 and OGL-BC v2.0 conformance decision time

[Herb Lainchbury]

My thought is that the open definition does not address exemptions for
licenses.  Maybe it should, but it doesn't now.  The definition only
addresses requirements of the licence when applied to a work.

>From the definition: "The term **license** refers to the legal license
under which the work is made available."

The question which the open definition does not currently address is "When
does a licence apply to a work?".

With respect to licences, the definition addresses only the permissiveness
of the licence, not how it is applied.  It says, in effect, if a licence
with these properties is applied to a work, and the work is released in
such a way as it meets the other non-licence related conditions of
openness, then the work is considered open.

So, while a given licence may be open - as I think is the case with the
BC-OGL and the AB-OGL, that's not sufficient to say that a certain work is
open.

For the work to be open it has to be accessible, re-distributable,
re-usable, etc.

No question, any publisher applying any open license in this manner will
discourage use because consumers will not know if the license applies and
may not have the resources to find out, but that's not the fault of a
license.  Perhaps even licenses such as the PDDL could be used in a similar
manner and the PDDL would be considered open but the works might not.

And, to go one step further, think that it is potentially possible that an
exemption could make a license non-open if it made it impossible to use in
opening a work.   If for example we saw an exemption that said: "this
license does not cover commercial use", then that would clearly make it
impossible to apply the license in a non-discriminatory way to any work.

But so long as a license meets the license related conditions of the
definition and could potentially be applied successfully to make at least
one work open, then the I think license should be considered open.

I think the correct way to deal with the conditions under which a license
is applied or not (including exemptions), is not by judging the licence,
but by judging the way in which the licence is applied.  And, so far, I
don't think we have a clause for that.  Maybe an idea for v1.3?

Unless I am missing something, right now I am +1/+1.

Happy to hear counter arguments.



On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Andrew Stott
> <andrew.stott at dirdigeng.com> wrote:
> > I'm broadly with Kent.
>
> Thanks to Kent for the analysis, which points to a possible important
> difference between BC and Alberta. If anyone wants to +1/-1 them
> separately, please do.
>
> > The UK OGL 2.0 has an exemption for "information that has neither been
> > published nor disclosed under information access legislation (including
> the
> > Freedom of Information Acts for the UK and Scotland) by or with the
> consent
> > of the Information Provider;".  As far as I can see the policy intent is
> to
> > exempt from the licence information which has been leaked or stolen.  It
> is
> > important to have the neither-nor construct because as a matter of policy
> > the UK has published information which had previously been refused under
> the
> > FOI Act, and in addition information which has been published is not
> > actually accessible under the UK-FOI.  Moreover the UK needs a broad
> > reference to "information access legislation" since there are rights to
> > information under not only the FOI Act but also under the Environmental
> > Protection Regulations and other legislation.
> >
> > I'm not happy with the Alberta version because it could exclude published
> > information if that information was not accessible under applicable laws;
> > that makes it more difficult for users to establish that they have Open
> > rights to published information.  It would be better to use the UK
> > neither-nor of publication and accessibility.
>
> This seems to put users in a bad spot, perhaps not quite as bad as the
>  "misleading" term thankfully stricken from UK OGL 2.0, but precisely
> not the sort of thing to desire from a public license, which is
> clarity of copyright permission. I'm *leaning* toward -1 on both
> Alberta and BC at this point, but would be happy to hear further
> arguments either way.
>
> Mike
>
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-- 
Herb
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