[okfn-discuss] Guide to Open Data Licensing

[Rufus Pollock]

The Guide now seems to be in robust enough form to be officially 
announced and blogged:

   http://blog.okfn.org/2007/06/27/guide-to-open-data-licensing/

Please also forward this to any communities that might be interested -- 
from the reaction to Jo's post back in April[1] it seems there are many 
of them and not just in the geodata community.

~rufus

[1]:http://blog.okfn.org/2007/04/01/copyright-not-applicable-to-geodata/

## Blog Post

Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data 
Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing 
data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The 
guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and 
update it:

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot 
of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to 
use when licensing it — something that had also become apparent 
following on from Jo’s post back in April on copyright not being 
applicable to geodata).

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help 
answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into 
two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how 
to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of 
intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.

This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done 
to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely 
so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it 
be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, 
check it out and feel free to make changes.