[od-discuss] City of Calgary Open Data License Conformance

[Herb Lainchbury]

City of Calgary

Attn: Walter Simbirski

Dear Mr Simbirski,

I am contacting you today on behalf of the Open Definition Advisory
Council, regarding your request of March 18, 2013 for the license to be
reviewed for conformance as an open data license as defined by the Open
Definition.

We appreciate you posting the license and for making the request to the
od-discuss mailing list.  We wish to make the following comments and
recommendations.

First, we encourage all open data publishers to use an established license
wherever possible.  We encourage this because we believe that it is the
best interests of both publishers and consumers of open data.

With respect to the Calgary Open Data License:


   1.

   We think that the wording “You will be fully responsible for any
   consequences resulting from any use of the Data” is unusual and
   unnecessary, and may severely limit what data users would be willing to do
   with the data.  This requirement to accept all responsibility is not
   considered open and we recommend that it be removed.



   1.

   The first paragraph of the Terms of Use page has provisions that state
   that users are bound by the Terms of Use, that they may change from time to
   time, and that the consumer must check the web page periodically to review
   the Terms of Use.  This requirement to check a changing license in
   perpetuity is not considered open.  We recommend a versioned approach to
   licensing and allowing users to continue to use data under the conditions
   of the license that applied when it was downloaded.  We also recommend
   removing this requirement to review the Terms of Use from time to time.
   2.

   The potential future requirement to remove attribution could be
   confusing and is not considered open.  Our recommendation is to remove
   this.
   3.

   The requirement to accept additional conditions for some datasets or web
   pages that might have additional conditions means that the license cannot
   be considered open.  If other conditions are necessary for some datasets,
   we recommend that those datasets be released under a separate (non-open)
   license that has the necessary provisions.  We recommend that this
   requirement be removed.
   4.

   The “Termination” paragraph includes wording that implies that the user
   may lose the right to use the data that they have previously downloaded
   using the license if The City chooses.  This is not considered open.  Our
   recommendation is to change this paragraph so that it is clear that the
   user can continue to use data that they have previously downloaded but that
   The City may choose to stop publishing said data.


The Open Definition requires that the data be freely usable for any purpose
including commercial ones subject at most to the requirement to attribute
and/or share-alike.  All of these points impose additional conditions on
the use of the data and so the license is not considered open.

While not strictly required for conformance, we also make the following
suggestions:


   1.

   We think that the wording “any lawful use” serves no real purpose and
   causes confusion for users.  We feel that open data licenses are a poor
   vehicle for law enforcement.  Laws themselves define what is lawful and
   unlawful and come with appropriate enforcement mechanisms.  We recommend
   that this be removed.
   2.

   The way the web page is structured, it’s not immediately clear if the
   “License” is just the paragraph on the page titled “License”, and thus a
   subset of the site “Terms of Use”, or if the “Terms of Use” apply to both
   the downloaded data and the web site.  We recommend unbundling the web site
   “Terms of Use” from the data “License” so that the two can be easily
   distinguished and understood.


As the Open Definition Advisory Council our first preference is that
publishers adopt one of the reusable licenses, such as CC-BY.  If that is
considered impractical, our second choice, is that publishers adopt a
license such as OGL Canada v2.0 that conforms to the definition and can
often be reused with only minor changes related jurisdiction name and
references to jurisdiction specific policies.

The Open Definition sets out principles to define ‘openness’ in relation to
content and data and is widely recognized as the international standard to
evaluate license compliance.

We appreciate you taking the time to explore this with the Open Data
Advisory Council.  It is our hope that you will find these suggestions
useful.  We would be pleased to discuss this with you further and explore
possibilities how we could help you make the "Calgary Open Data License"
compliant with the Open Definition.  Please do not hesitate to contact us
if we can be of further assistance.


Kind regards,


Herb Lainchbury

on behalf of the Open Definition Advisory Council


Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
www.okfn.org | www.opendefinition.org
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