[open-government] Quirky licencing issue

Wed Apr 20 20:13:07 UTC 2011

Tim,

Thanks for the explanation, I wasn't aware of the notion of Crown copyright.
It still looks weird to a public body to restrict usage of its data (be it
with copyright or contract), but whatever. Hope you find a way to solve your
problem.

Best regards,

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Tim McNamara
<paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz>wrote:

> New Zealand, along with many Commonwealth countries, has the notion of
> Crown copyright[1]. In general, departments provide their works for any
> purpose for no fee, so long as it is not used in a misleading way. However,
> each department differs in its willingness to provide its content under an
> open licence.
>
> In this specific case, I think that copyright does not apply, contract law
> does. It's very difficult for the Crown to claim that it owns copyright of
> business names that it holds. The other data, such as addresses, seem like
> pure facts to me. However, because I am using their service, I am bound by
> their terms of use under contract law. Those terms of use prohibit what I
> mentioned in my last email.
>
>
> Tim McNamara  |  @timClicks <http://twitter.com/timClicks>  |
> timmcnamara.co.nz
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#New_Zealand
>
>
> On 21 April 2011 05:55, Vítor Baptista <vitor at vitorbaptista.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> I can't help you with your issue, but I'm curious: isn't the data made by
>> a public body also public? I mean, does the Ministry of Economic Development
>> owns the copyright of what it produces?
>>
>> Sometimes here in Brazil I face the same problem, but I simply ignore it.
>> In fact, I hope whatever public body claims to own the copyright to sue me,
>> so we can test this interpretation (that the data is public) in court and
>> clear up this doubt.
>>
>> I would like to know if this isn't the case in New Zealand too.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> 2011/4/20 Tim McNamara <paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz>
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> open-government mailing list
>>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Vítor Baptista
>>
>>
>

-- 
Vítor Baptista
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-government/attachments/20110420/5dc987ef/attachment-0001.html>