[od-discuss] Status of Vancouver and Surrey OGL varients

Thu Nov 20 08:40:36 UTC 2014

On 11/20/2014 12:26 AM, Herb Lainchbury wrote:
> I will start off this discussion, with what I think is the main issue 
> with the OGL-Surrey-1.0 license 
> <http://data.surrey.ca/pages/open-government-licence-surrey>, which is 
> one of the statements in the Exemptions section.
> Namely:
>
> This license does not grant you any right to use:
> * Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom of 
> Information and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.);
>
> The basic problem that I see with this exemption is that if this 
> license is applied to a work, I have no idea if the license applies 
> without consulting and understanding the Freedom of Information and 
> Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.) and figuring out if the work I want 
> to access is or is not accessible under this Act.
FIPPA has two relevant classes of information - what must not be shared, 
and what may be shared, but doesn't have to be. It's not obvious which 
class of information the license refers to. I believe it's the former.

My solution to this issue has been to ask the government releasing the 
dataset if what I wanted was accessible under the FIPPA act, to which 
they've always answered yes. In case of a no or a non-answer, I'd have 
to FOI the information I needed, showing that it was accessible.

The above is a stupid process to have to go through to establish FIPPA 
accessibility.

A bigger issue to me is that I've been told by governments using them 
that the OGL-BC derived licenses (OGL-Surrey, OGL-Vancouver) are not 
compatible with CC BY, ODC-BY or the ODbL. Because the Canadian OGL 
variants are essentially only usable by a single government, this leaves 
me with an impossible situation for making works from multiple sources 
and my work.

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