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

Wed Nov 26 18:57:24 UTC 2014

Thanks Paul and Herb. This is very helpful.

David

On Nov 26, 2014, at 9:22 AM, Herb Lainchbury <herb at dynamic-solutions.com<mailto:herb at dynamic-solutions.com>> wrote:

Hi David,

The UK-OGL clause doesn't force data consumers to dive into the legislation.

It says, "Information that has not been accessed by way of publication or disclosure under information access legislation (including the Freedom of Information Acts for the UK and Scotland) by or with the consent of the Information Provider;"

So, if it's in their catalogue, consent is given, and I can use it.

The Surrey clause says, "Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.);".

To consumers this means they now have to dive into the Act to see if what they want to consume is accessible or not.

Herb

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 8:52 AM, Wrate, David GCPE:EX <David.Wrate at gov.bc.ca<mailto:David.Wrate at gov.bc.ca>> wrote:
Hello all, David Wrate from the Province of BC here.
I’d like to further understand how the FOI clause affect non-conformance.
I ask only because the UK v3.0 has been deemed conformant and contains an FOI clause. Is there subtlety in the language of its clause that makes the difference?
Seeking to understand and improve.
Cheers,
David
From: od-discuss [mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org<mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org>] On Behalf Of Herb Lainchbury
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 8:19 AM
To: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org<mailto:od-discuss at lists.okfn.org>
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Status of Vancouver and Surrey OGL varients

"2.2 Acceptable Conditions
The license shall not limit, make uncertain, or otherwise diminish the permissions required in Section 2.1 except by the following allowable conditions:"

I think the exemption in question makes it uncertain whether or not the permissions are in fact granted.  And it does so in a way that is not one of the Acceptable Ways.

While there may be other issues, this one seems fairly obvious to me and would cause me to vote no.

BTW, this is not only an issue with the BC-derived licenses, other provinces (Ontario, Alberta) have also forked the Canadian license in ways that I think make it uncertain whether permissions are granted.

There are also examples of forks of the Canadian license that do not have this issue.  The city of Winnipeg ( https://data.winnipeg.ca/open-data-licence ) and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC ( https://www.oipc.bc.ca/media/15403/open-government-licence.pdf ) are two such examples.

I am considering calling for a vote on this in the next few days.  Further discussion is still welcome.

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com<mailto:ml at gondwanaland.com>> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Paul Norman <penorman at mac.com<mailto:penorman at mac.com>> wrote:
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.

Hmm, I said I would listen and probably abstain, but I'm switching to the BC-derived licenses are non-open and I will vote no if they come up for a vote. If the licenses by themselves aren't enough to allow any user to make any use, they aren't open.

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.

That's also extremely annoying but wouldn't make the licenses non-open per the definition.

Mike

--