[open-science] Openness and Licensing of (Open) Data

Tue Feb 10 17:34:53 UTC 2009

2009/2/9 Bill Hooker <cwhooker at fastmail.fm>:
[snip]

> I thought the native state of data was public domain.  Copyright does
> not inhere in facts, and patents have to be applied for to be got, so
> why would you have to license data to make it public domain?  Surely
> just making it available serves that purpose?  The point of a norm or
> statement (or even a license) placing it in the public domain is only to
> make it *unambiguously* available to everyone, forever.

No, things aren't that simple ... See this guide to open data
licensing we prepared a couple of years ago

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

especially the section on "What Legal (IP) Rights Are There in Data
(and Databases)".

> Moreover, waiving one's rights doesn't seem to me to be "very close" to
> a license at all.  Licenses exert control, waivers do away with it.

I quite understand your point but a license can also be a way of just
allowing people to do stuff. As (I think) Yishay said earlier a
statement such as:

"You can take this stuff and do whatever you want with it"

is a license.

Rufus