[open-archaeology] Open Data Licences and the Heritage Lottery Fund (great guidance but recommend the NC clause) - lobbying activity

Thu Feb 7 21:25:54 UTC 2013

Dear All,

TL/DR: We would like to influence the Heritage Lottery Fund to change 
their data licence from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY to stop data fragmentation. Do 
you support this?

I've been in communication with Lorna Richardson over the past few 
months about the Heritage Lottery Fund guidance entitled “Using digital 
technologies in heritage projects”. This is a truly wonderful and 
forwarding looking piece of work which IMHO opinion has a substantial 
flaw; they mandate that any content they fund must be made available 
under a CC-BY-NC licence. I'm loving it until the Non-Commercial clause.

I believe they have done this with the best of intentions but do not 
quite see the potential negative implications the NC clause this may 
have over the medium to long term.
I have spoken to one of their managers and they are somewhat perplexed 
as to why NC might be a problem. I said I would get in touch with a 
number of organisations, get a concensus and then get back to them 
(although likely to be informally through Bob Bewley in the first 
instance). This is the first step in this process.

Together with Lorna we have created a document which outlines the impact 
of NC as we see it and have set forward some recommendations to try to 
influence HLF to change this clause (at least for the data elements - I 
do have sympathy with their arguments that the data creators should be 
in the best position to financially exploit the resources they generate 
particularly if this is images, video or books (but not data (I don't 
consider raw photos to be data per-se))). The recommendation is to 
organise a workshop (under the auspices of OKF or ADS??) with key 
stakeholders in place. The outputs can be used to catalyse an immediate 
re-draft or inform a future re-draft (depending on how they take the 
recommendations!).

You can find the document here: 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nw8kwSYdcLgf_QFo5sugRgrwtDtYZomeJ4Sh9T-T46Y/edit?usp=sharing

It is open to edits and comments: please feel free.

Please be aware this is primarily of UK interest. However, the 
implications are global.

I would like to find out if:
this document reflects the views of the members of this forum (i.e. can 
I sign it off as representative of this forum).
how we can get OKF to provide support for this activity (someone with 
decent debating skills at the workshop with a rounded legal knowledge of 
the CC licences and their impact on the data landscape)
which other forums/stakeholders to canvas (Antiquist/ADS, etc.)
Views on stakeholders to invite
Views on funding (HLF may not fund this activity)
and obviously critique of the document itself.

I've pasted the executive summary below.

Thanks for reading this far :-)

Best

Ant

Executive Summary

The HLF have produced a guidance document entitled 'Using digital 
technologies in heritage projects'. This document establishes a 21st 
century agenda for funding agencies by recognising the long-term role 
that project content play in science and social agendas. The Open Data 
in Archaeology working group strongly endorses this document and 
believes that improving long-term access to project content will have 
immense impact across domains and have particular benefits for engagement.

However, the Open Data in Archaeology working group has some concerns 
about the use of the Creative Commons by attribution non-commercial 
(CC-BY-NC) licence for all project content. Whilst we see the benefit 
for many project resources we would question the benefit of this licence 
for resources described as 'preservation technologies'. We feel that 
whilst CC-BY-NC may provide some short-term benefits it has the 
potential to produce license incompatibilities which may introduce 
profound problems in the medium to long term. It has the potential to 
fragment the data landscape creating pockets of knowledge which are 
rarely used in mainstream analysis, research or policy making. This will 
be further exacerbated when automated data aggregation and analysis 
systems become the norm. We believe that such fragmentation goes against 
the intent of the HLF document which is clearly focused on 
accessibility, engagement and enjoyment by all.

We would like to engage in further discussion with the HLF on these 
issues and propose that a workshop is established to bring together the 
major re-use stakeholders under the umbrella of the Open Knowledge 
Foundation (who will provide legal, technical and practical advice on 
licence issues).