[open-government] Deciphering licensing in Project Open Data

Mon May 27 22:49:32 UTC 2013

On 05/26/2013 07:41 PM, Stepan Stehlicek wrote:
> Do US want to publish it
> under any license or it is completely ok with them to have it
> "licensed" under public domain?

I'm sure most agencies simply haven't thought about it. Most aren't in 
the content creation business anyway, and to the extent they're 
comfortable with their U.S. public domain status now, they probably 
don't have any interest in enforcing copyright protection overseas. But 
at the same time, they have little incentive to pay their lawyers to 
figure out the international copyright situation, so they probably won't 
side one way or the other.

There may be agencies that would see foreign copyright as a revenue 
model (say, our National Weather Service, or Government Printing 
Office). Maybe they already take advantage of it! (To answer one of your 
questions, I think it would be legally possible to have a work be public 
domain in the U.S. but licensed elsewhere, assuming our working 
understanding of international copyright law is right.)

Thanks Brian, Timothy, and Braden too for the other thoughts, especially 
the WIPO angle.

- Josh Tauberer (@JoshData)

http://razor.occams.info