[OSM-legal-talk] Open Government License - Canada

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Mon Nov 4 04:28:56 UTC 2013


cc'ing to a few people who I have talked about this with in the past.

Some governments in Canada have released data under the Open Government 
Licence - Canada, version 2.0. This is yet another new license. Some 
people have asked if we can use datasets available under this license. 

http://data.gc.ca/eng/open-government-licence-canada contains the full 
text of the version the Federal government is using. It is an 
attribution license and in a perfect world would be ODbL compatible. Of 
course we've seen plenty of attribution licenses screw something or 
other up. 

What is not obvious is that they expect other levels to modify the 
license to localize it with the information of their attribution 
statement and local laws, but let's start with the Federal one first.
Once that's done we can look at BC, AB, Nanaimo, Vancouver... etc.

One of the statements in the consultation on this license was "The 
change of the attribution statement from OGL v1.0 to be one specific to 
the federal government reduces the ability to reuse this license by 
other jurisdictions (e.g. provinces) and will increase the number of 
licenses that have to be analysed." 

The origin of this license is the OGL 1.0, a UK license. 

The principle difference between UK and Canadian law is that database 
right does not exist in Canada. 

http://opendefinition.org/licenses/ lists OGL Canada 2.0 as an Open 
Definition conformant license. 

The question that matters for OSM is, can OGL Canada 2.0 datasets be 
released under the ODbL. 

One issue raised as problematic in some versions of the license is 
"Personal Information" 

For OSM, I do not see this as an issue. "Personal Information" is 
information about an identifiable individual, but datasets we would be 
interested in are information about places, not individuals. 

Third-party rights are a rights-clearing issue and something we'll need 
to check before using any source. 

Names, crests, etc and other IP rights would not be found in datasets of 
interest to OSM. 

Attribution is an odd one because they refer to information providers in 
the plural, but define it in a way so that it is only singular, so it's 
not clear which part of the attribution requirements applies. The ODbL 
requires that any copyright notices be kept intact for derivative 
databases. Produced works require a notice reasonably calculated to make 
any Person [...] aware that the content was obtained from [the 
database]. Attribution looks ODbL compatible, provided we figure out 
what statement to use. 

I'm not really sure where to take it from here in terms of an analysis.




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