[od-discuss] Fwd: Conformance - Open Government License -?Surrey 1.0

Fri Mar 6 17:34:18 UTC 2015

I am not sure that I see a problem with the licence itself (as opposed to what Paul was told). As far as I can see that it operates as a straightforward Attribution licence and not as a Share-Alike. If one creates a derivative work then there needs to be an attribution statement(s) for that information which was provided under the OGL-Surrey. But it does not say that other content needs to be licensed in the same way, and it explicitly envisages (subsection 2 of “You must”) that the derivate work might contain information from multiple providers with multiple attribution requirements and offers an easement on the attribution requirement in those circumstances.

As far as I can see the model is that a subsequent downstream re-user get their rights for the Surrey information not from the intermediate developer but directly from Surrey themselves to the full extent of the original licence: that’s the purpose of having to provide a link back to OGL-Surrey itself in any published re-use.  That’s the same as the model for CC-BY 4.0 and for UK-OGL.

The problem seems to be in what Paul was told – that the whole of the new work would need to be licensed under OGL-Surrey. As I understand it the OGL-Surrey licence would actually allow Paul to licence the *whole* of his new work, *including* the Surrey content, under (almost) *any* terms he wished, as long as he gave the required attribution for the Surrey content and a link to the Surrey licence for that content. Users of Paul’s work could then get the Surrey content themselves and have full OGL-Surrey rights to it directly (so satisfying OD 2.0 clause 2.1.7 and the second sentence of OD 2.0 clause 2.1.4). CC-BY 4.0 would operate in the same way. That would also be consistent with the second part of OD 2.0 clause 2.1.3 which requires the licence to *allow* the redistribution of *derivative works* on no less restrictive terms - it does not *require* these terms. 

Regards

Andrew

From: od-discuss [mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Herb Lainchbury
Sent: 06 March 2015 05:12
To: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Fwd: Conformance - Open Government License - Surrey 1.0

I would like to hear from others on this before we take another vote on the Surrey license.  I think we have to take a license as it is written.

In my opinion, the extra condition that Paul mentions, that he must publish derivatives using the same license, is not something that the license itself says.

Further, the fact that it makes re-use impractical ( a developer is unlikely to to re-publish using the City License ) says to me that this is not the actual intention, and I certainly would not interpret it that way. 

Based on the City of Surrey license v2.0 alone, I would feel free to use the data from the City of Surrey and re-publish using another open licence.  I would look at Kent's tool ( http://www.clipol.org/licences/CAN-GoC-ODL-2.0 ) and see that the Canada license, which is almost identical to the Surrey license shows a number of licenses that are compatible.

I would acknowledge that the city is one of my sources of data and would attribute them in the manner they specified.

Herb

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Herb Lainchbury <herb at dynamic-solutions.com> wrote:

2.1.3 reads: "The license must allow the creation of derivatives of the licensed work and allow the distribution of such derivatives under the same terms of the original licensed work."

I read that to mean, "the same terms" not "the same license".  So if I distribute my work under a license that I create called MyGreatLicense that has the same terms, then I am not in violation.  Those terms would include things like giving the City credit (attribution) and giving downstream users the same rights I was given.  Maybe that's not practically possible either, but that's how I would interpret it to start out with.

If there was a term in the license that said I had to use the same license, then we would have a true share-alike license as I understand it, and I too would consider it unusable since I'm not the City.

The fact that the city told you that you would have to license under the OGL - Surrey is indeed problematic.  I think that has to be an error.  If that is what they intended I would expect to see that the terms of the license itself.

Are you able to ask for clarification?

H

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Aaron Wolf <wolftune at riseup.net> wrote:

Good catch. Assuming you are right that they have a share-alike combined
with a discrimination on who can use the *license* (which is different
from discriminating about who can use the data), it does seem to be a
problem still. Given their response earlier, I suspect we can have them
rectify this.

On 03/02/2015 12:28 PM, Paul Norman wrote:
> On 2/26/2015 6:47 PM, Herb Lainchbury wrote:
>> I have placed a copy of the revised Open Government License - Surrey
>> (City of Surrey, BC, Canada) into our /licenses/inreview repository.
>>
>> As noted in this thread they have adopted our recommendation and one
>> of our two suggestions.
>>
>> I intend to call for a vote on this new version (2.0) in in a few days.
> Looking over my correspondence with Surrey, I believe the license still
> has a flaw which prevents conformance with 2.1.3.
>
> There is general agreement that only information* by the City of Surrey
> can be licensed under the OGL - Surrey.
>
> I was considering the case where I create a new work of information
> which is a mix of Surrey information and information I have created. The
> city told me that this would need to be licensed under the OGL - Surrey.
> The only problem is that not being the City of Surrey, I can't release
> information under their license.
>
> This has in effect created a situation where you have a share-alike
> license which only one party can use.
>
> 2.1.3 requires that work allow the distribution of derivatives under the
> same terms, which you can't do here. It also does not allow derivatives
> under different terms.
>
> * information as defined in the license
> _______________________________________________
> od-discuss mailing list
> od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/od-discuss
_______________________________________________
od-discuss mailing list
od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/od-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/attachments/20150306/ce2de8cb/attachment-0003.html>