[od-discuss] Open Government License - Alberta

Sun Jun 9 18:00:38 UTC 2013

On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 8:48 PM, Herb Lainchbury
<herb at dynamic-solutions.com> wrote:
> I am thinking that this technically would meet the definition, however, as I
> have mentioned before (
> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2012-June/000153.html) , we
> continue to see rights clearing issues.
[...]
> Having said that, the definition doesn't currently require any sort of
> rights clearing, or publishers saying specifically what the license applies
> to.  I seem to recall someone (Mike?) saying that some versions of CC have
> similar clauses that presumably protect the publisher in case they
> inadvertently publish someone else's work.   I guess my concern is mainly
> that this policy leaves the consumer on their own to figure out if a right
> is being infringed, even though they are typically the least equipped to do
> so, often having no way to establish the origin of the data.

Only 1.0 of the various CC licenses (the ones first published in 2002,
not CC0) include a warranty of having secured rights, see 5(a) of
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/legalcode

This was removed in 2.0, see https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216

There has been some discussion of this again re 4.0 which you can read
about at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Disclaimer_of_warranties_and_related_issues
but the end result is it will only be made more explicit that a
licensor can offer warranties if they want.

I can't think of any public license besides CC 1.0 ones that include a
warranty of non-infringement. PDDL definitely does not; I'm not sure
what you mean in
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2012-June/000153.html

I understand the logic/appeal of wanting required warranties as you
express above, but the nature of various "IP" regimes makes them hard
to offer without compensation, and runs danger of making "open" be
seen as a cost center even more than it already is. I think a happy
medium is waiving any privileges the licensor may have, understanding
others could hold other privileges. Thus my quibble with “This Licence
does not grant you any right to use: … Information subject to other
intellectual property rights, including patents and trademarks.” which
would seem to be kind of an anti-warranty -- if subject to other
privileges, I don't offer you a license at all!

Mike