[open-government] Deciphering licensing in Project Open Data

Thu May 23 03:02:52 UTC 2013

To add on to this and clarify what Timothy wrote about in that post,  
the memorandum is almost entirely incoherent on the subject of 
licensing, and in three ways.

First, it says that agencies should use open licenses for all data, 
period. Data produced by the federal government is typically not subject 
to copyright protection. You can't license something you don't own. If 
agencies began attempting to create "open licenses" for public domain 
data, we are going to be in a lot of trouble. (Data produced by 
government contractors is subject to copyright protection, which is a 
major loophole in our copyright law.)

Second, every place where it mentions "open license" it says something 
like "an open license that places no restriction on use." That's a 
*stronger* policy than simply open license. That is to say, I think the 
memorandum is pretty clear in requiring agencies to use a license that 
is *both* OKD-style open *as well as* placing no restrictions on use. 
The only "license" that I know of that does that is CC0 (or the PDDL).

Third, the memorandum directs agencies to consult the Project Open Data 
(POD) github account for implementation advice, but the POD site 
portrays the policy as if "no restrictions on use" were not in the 
memorandum. So, again, it's incredibly unclear what the White House 
intended.

Here in the U.S. we have unusually, if not uniquely, strong norms about 
the government not interfering with public knowledge. Propaganda is 
illegal. Freedom of the press is incredibly strong (recent events 
notwithstanding). Requiring attribution to the government, for instance, 
which might sound reasonable elsewhere, would be a major policy shift 
with significant legal implications for the press. "No restrictions on 
use" is our baseline. The consensus in the open data community here has 
long been that open government data is not "open" (in the sense of the 
OKD) but license-free. Even though "open license" sounds great, it's 
actually a step away from freedom.

I've written more on this here:

http://razor.occams.info/blog/2013/05/09/new-open-data-memorandum-almost-defines-open-data-misses-mark-with-open-licenses/

- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData)

http://razor.occams.info

On 05/22/2013 02:02 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> Thought this might be of interest:
>
> Deciphering licensing in Project Open Data
> http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/38316
>
> -- 
>
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Director of Policy and Ideas  | **@jwyg <https://twitter.com/jwyg>**
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