[open-government] Quirky licencing issue

Wed Apr 20 06:34:26 UTC 2011

I've been attempting to get data from on New Zealand's Ministry of Economic
Development. They have a web API for their registries of
companies, charities, intellectual property, banned directors and so forth.
Their licence for a web API key prohibits a few things. 1) I can't disclose
any of the API calls or XML schema details and 2) the use of their data must
not be used for direct marketing purposes.

I am thinking about making denormalised data publicly available. Probably
through a repository such as Infochimps or Tallis's dataincubator.org.
However, I may be held liable if someone downstream from me uses it for
direct marketing purposes.

What do people suggest? At this stage, I am thinking of providing
information less addresses, e.g. just company names and maybe a city. Does
this seem sensible?

Tim McNamara  |  @timClicks <http://twitter.com/timClicks>  |
timmcnamara.co.nz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-government/attachments/20110420/d489cdff/attachment.html>