Seeking a licence for Open Data
20 December 2007 Update: search over… licence found!
In the world of creative works, notions espoused by Lawrence Lessig and others over a number of years are becoming increasingly well understood. A Creative Commons license, for example, is recognised as giving the holder of rights an ability to prospectively grant certain permissions rather than limit use of their work by expecting all comers to request these permissions, again and again. Those rights are not cast aside, removing all opportunities to protect your work, your name, or your potential revenue stream. Rather, you are provided with a means to explicitly declare that your work may be used and reused by others in certain ways without their needing to request permission. Any other use is not forbidden; those uses must simply be negotiated in the ‘normal’ way… a normal way that also applied to those uses covered by Creative Commons licenses before the advent of those licenses.
Creative Commons licenses are an extension of copyright law, as enshrined in the legal frameworks of various jurisdictions internationally. As such, it doesn’t really work terribly well for a lot of (scientific, business, whatever) data… but the absence of anything better has led people to try slapping Creative Commons licenses of various types on data that they wish to share. It will be interesting to see what happens, the first time one of those licenses needs to be upheld via a court!
At Talis, we have an interest in seeing large bodies of structured data available for use. Through the Talis Platform, we offer one means whereby such data may be stored, used, aggregated and mined, although we clearly recognise that similar data may very well also be required in similar contexts.
Recognising that contributors of such data need to be reassured as to the uses to which we - and others - may put their hard work, we spent some time a couple of years ago drafting something then called the Talis Community Licence. This draft licence is based upon protections enshrined in European Law, and has been used ‘in anger’ for a while to cover contributions of millions of records to one particular application on the Talis Platform.
There has been plenty of talk around ‘open data‘ here on Nodalities, and on our sister blog Panlibus. See, for example, this recent post from Rob Styles. There were also fascinating discussions at the WWW2007 conference earlier this year.
Despite interest in open (or ‘linked‘) data, licenses to provide protection (and, of course, to explicitly encourage reuse) are few and far between. Amongst zealous early adopters, there does seem to be a tendency to either (mis)use a Creative Commons license, to say nothing whatsoever, or to cast their data into the public domain. None of these strategies are fit for application to business-critical data.
Building upon our original work on the TCL, we recently provided funding to lawyers Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde. They were tasked with validating the principles behind the license, developing an effective expression of those principles that could be applied beyond the database-aware shores of Europe, and working with us to identify a suitable home in which this new licence could be hosted, nurtured, and carried forward for the benefit of stakeholders far outside Talis.
Today, Jordan posted the latest draft of this license (now going by the name ‘Open Data Commons‘), some rationale, and pointers to various ways in which he - and we - are seeking input and further validation.
As my colleague Rob (again!) has argued, curators of data need an option on the permissions continuum between free-for-all and locked down. The Open Data Commons, née Talis Community Licence, offers that option.
Take a look. Think about how you would use it. Consider what sort of administrative framework you would want behind such a license. Join the conversation.
Technorati Tags: Creative Commons, Linked Data, open data, Open Knowledge Foundation, open data commons, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, WWW2007
September 24th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
What exactly do you think are the problems with CC licenses for data? They offer more than two kinds of licences, and you haven’t offered any other criticisms.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Marcin,
Creative Commons is a great movement, and their licenses have been truly transformative in getting people to think about - and engage with - remixing their creative content. I use them myself, and have been involved in evangelising their use in the UK for a few years.
However, Creative Commons licenses (of which, as you say, there are several) are extensions of Copyright Law, and copyright does not - and cannot - apply to the factual content in a database. That’s not Creative Commons’ ‘fault’; it’s a fact of the law.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:40 am
As you point out, Creative Commons is a copyright license and therefore doesn’t apply to facts, which I understand people are free to copy and use as they please by default (though database copyrights may apply in some countries). The proposed, new license (if I understood correctly) isn’t meant to add any restrictions on the use of facts or try to work around the database copyright law differences, either, so I’m not sure I understand the motivation for the new license?
September 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Thanks for the comment Eric. I’m not too sure if I have your question right, but maybe a few points will help.
Databases can have any type of content — not just factual information.
The factual information licence(in the same vein as BSD/MIT licences) is for information that has a questionable copyright status in some jurisdiction. This could be because some of the info is not purely factual, or because the jurisdiction has a ’sweat of the brow’ test for copyright and the ‘creator’ of the facts spent a lot of effort collecting them. This licence gives people peace of mind about this information and any copyright claim.
The Database licence (as opposed to the factual information licence) applies for databases — that is when facts or other information is gathered together in a database. These databases are likely to attract copyright in most jurisdictions, and in Europe may also attract Database Rights. Note that copyright over a database is separate from copyright (or lack therof) in the contents of a database. The Database Licence covers these rights, worldwide, with the requirement that users share alike.
Any other questions, please let me know.
September 25th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Given that licences do not have proprietary effect, and cannot be attached to facts in the same way that copyright attaches to works, I don’t see that you need anything other than a statement disclaiming any restrictions on the use of the database, and an appropriate CC license regarding the copyright in the database.
Put simply, database right isn’t going to bind third parties who receive a few data that are not copyright.
Even assuming that database right could bite on extracts from the database that are not in themselves copyright, so that third parties are bound, how is it going to help bind those scond parties operating in jurisdictions that do not recognise database rights, or copyright in the underlying data, or the third parties who receive them from those second parties?
September 25th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
In Jordan’s thoughts he specifically suggests that the database license (”Open Data Commons”) will NOT be intended to cover “the data independent of the database.” It will cover copyright in the database as a whole, and it will cover EU database rights.
I believe he is justified in this decision.
The reason he’s justified is in fact because “the data independent of the database” is in fact generally content that can already be covered by Creative Commons. It’s these special rights—EU database rights, and copyright in the db as a whole–that Creative Commons and other existing licenses are not entirely appropriate for.
The conslusion to draw from this, for something like the Talis project, is that you DO still need to have contributors properly licensing that content within the db. You need to have contributors of specific data subsets to contribute under a Creative Commons or other suitable license, if that data being submitted (the ‘data independent of the database’) may possibly itself be covered by copyright. (Some data is of course not copyrightable, which may also vary slightly by jurisdiction). Unless this is done, I don’t think you’ve achieved the actual protection for openness you would like.
PS: Much respect to Talis for funding this legal work.
September 26th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Thanks for the further comment Marcin, and thanks to Jonathan for responding as well.
I think that there are a few issues tangled up in your comments Marcin, so I’d like to mae a few points.
– CC no longer offers an SA only licence (that is up-to-date).
– The Open Data Commons Licence specifically addresses some of the issues of databases that are not addressed in the CC licences. One big part is the stating in the licence itself what is likely to have copyright.
– The EU’s Database Right, which covers the extraction and re-utilisation of a substantial part of the contents does cover, in a very limited way in the licence, taking the contents and putting them into a new database.
– Contract is the third approach in the licence for jurisdictions without a DB right. I should note that contract is how the use of factual information is controlled in many settings, especially in the US.
– The ‘burden’ on users is actually really light — they must give notice, keep the licence with the material, and share alike.
Thanks!
September 26th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Science Commons has a page with some explanations regarding Creative Commons and databases. It seems that two of the European versions of the Creative Commons licenses (Belgium and Netherlands) do mention the “database rights”. I’m not sure why this isn’t mentioned in all versions of the licenses, would be interesting to know if there is a good reason for this or if it’s just a historical accident. Have there been any discussions between the Creative Commons and the Open Data Commons people?
September 26th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Absolutely there has been conversation between the two. Long story short, the reason why some of the European CC licences include DB rights is because the legal leads on those teams included them. They are often considered separate rights, and so some teams didn’t licence them with the copyright. Also there is a question as to what to do with them — they operate differently than copyright and the question of how to license them was an issue. This is a good idea for a post, so I’ll add more on my blog.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
[...] aimed to get it established as an open licence governed by a trusted neutral provider and this was confirmed in a post by Paul Miller in September 2007. And now the results of that work is openly [...]