Re: W3C eGov: Licensing Discussion

Hello, and happy new year!

I'm a member of the Open Data team in the Ministry of Planning, Budget
 and Management at Brazil. It's interesting to find this discussion
happening at this W3C list, as we have been discussing for the past
year what licensing to apply to open data. Following
opendatacommons.org guidelines, we have threaded this line:

* for content, CC-Zero [1] is the gold standard, CC-BY-SA [2] is acceptable..
* for data, PDDL [3] is the gold standard, DBCL [4] is acceptable.

We are still left with a few questions, which I know are a non-issue
for some countries, such as the USA, where the law mandates that
government data is in the public domain. But consider other countries
where this is not the case or where the law is not so clear. For
government content and data, what would be the advantages (for the
public or for the government) of going full public domain forsaking
the requirement of attribution? Maybe, when a third party
re-distributes the data, the lack of attribution gives the idea that
this distribution is not explictitly endorsed by government, is that
it?

On another question, a particular group of open data activists [5] in
our country have been arguing that public data has never needed a
license to be reused, that it's not in our culture. Indeed, most
public data released over the years by public bodies have not had an
explicit licensing associated with them. They ask: if we now begin to
require a license, what happens to the state of this already released
data? They also say that our newly stated Freedom of Public
Information Law does mandate that information shall be public as a
rule, and establish secrecy as an exception. But the question is: is
that enough? There hasn't yet been a review of this situation by
lawyers, especially under light of this new law. It may or may not be
the case that we still do need a license for open data. While we await
for one such legal review, we'd like to hear what has been the
situation and your experiences in other countries in regards to
licensing, in particular where the law is not so crystal clear about
it.

Best regards,
Augusto Herrmann
Open Data Team
Ministry of Planning, Budget & Management - Brazil

[1] http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/
[3] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/
[4] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/
[5] http://thacker.com.br/

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Brand Niemann <bniemann@cox.net> wrote:
> http://gov.aol.com/2011/12/23/creative-commons-licensing-government-data-and
> -services/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Holm, Jeanne M (1760) [mailto:jeanne.m.holm@jpl.nasa.gov]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 6:43 PM
> To: Phil Archer; eGov IG (Public)
> Cc: Anne Fitzgerald; Timothy Vollmer; Sarah Pearson
> Subject: W3C eGov: Licensing Discussion
>
> Hi all--
>
> Thanks to all involved, including speakers Anne Fitzgerald, Sarah Pearson,
> and Tim Vollmer (copied here), and to Bernadette Hyland for scribing and to
> Phil Archer for facilitating/scribing/logistics.
>
> Looking forward to meeting agenda suggestions for 17 January.  One thought
> is on the open source platforms around open government and open data.  Let
> me know your ideas!
>
> Our speakers did offer to answer a few follow up questions on the list
> serve, particularly given the time zone differences and that some could not
> attend today's meeting.  Please respond to this thread to carry forward the
> conversation!
>
> Thanks again and have a wonderful and joyous holiday and new year!
>
> --Jeanne
>
> **********************************************************
> Jeanne Holm
> Evangelist, Data.gov
> U.S. General Services Administration
> Cell: (818) 434-5037
> Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn: JeanneHolm
> **********************************************************
>
>
>
>
> On 12/20/11 6:36 PM, "Phil Archer" <phila@w3.org> wrote:
>
>>The minutes of the eGov IG meeting are now available on the wiki at
>>http://www.w3.org/egov/IG/meeting/2011-12-20.
>>
>>We were joined by Tim Vollmer and Sarah Pearson from Creative Commons
>>in the US and Anne Fitzgerald from the University of Queensland - an
>>interesting discussion about licences and the public sector's attitudes
>>towards and uses of them.
>>
>>A big thank you to the guests!
>>
>>Phil.
>>
>>--
>>
>>
>>Phil Archer
>>W3C eGovernment
>>http://www.w3.org/egov/
>>
>>http://philarcher.org
>>@philarcher1
>>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 2 January 2012 13:06:33 UTC