[od-discuss] Open Government License - Alberta

Tue Jun 4 22:57:19 UTC 2013

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Herb Lainchbury
<herb at dynamic-solutions.com> wrote:
> Alberta, one of our Canadian Provinces, just released their open data portal
> today using a license they are calling Version 2.0 of the Open Government
> License - Alberta.
>
> http://data.alberta.ca/licence
>
> Would appreciate thoughts from the group.

Pretty good. But first, "any lawful use", is that necessary? Not
present in OGL-UK nor in proposed OGL-Canada, and seems superfluous --
if use is not lawful, user has other problems.

Second, two comments replicated from
http://opendefinition.org/2013/01/31/ogl-canada-proposal-feedback/

* “This Licence does not grant you any right to use: … Information
subject to other intellectual property rights, including patents and
trademarks.” This might be placed even more strongly in the exemption
category if merely stating that no patents are trademark permissions
are granted, rather than removing any right to use information subject
to any of these.

* 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 would seem not to cover any use of personal data such as
published names.

Mike