[OSM-legal-talk] Houston, TX, open data policy license compliance

Kathleen Lu kathleen.lu at mapbox.com
Tue Aug 13 23:30:06 UTC 2019


Ah, apologies, Jan, I was too hasty in my assessment. If you click on the
CC-BY link, you will see that only the "School District" dataset is CC-BY.
If you do inquire, I would first ask if the dataset you are interested in
is in the public domain, as that is possible under US law, and would be
most fitting for the description of open data in
http://www.houstontx.gov/adminpolicies/8-7.html as "freely used, shared and
built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose."
And to Simon's point about third-party rights, while there are no
guarantees, the policy does mention "Exempt Data" as including data to
which there are contractual limitations, so it appears that the city at
least made some effort to exclude third-party data from open data.
-Kathleen

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 2:42 PM Kathleen Lu <kathleen.lu at mapbox.com> wrote:

> Hi Jan,
> Specifically, here's is an example of the Geographic Boundaries page that
> indicates a CC-BY license:
> http://data.houstontx.gov/group/geographic-boundaries
> On the left side, at the bottom of the list of information. I would
> surmise that this applies to all the geographic boundary datasets, but you
> can ask them for clarification.
> Best,
> Kathleen
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 4:43 AM Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
>
>> While the policy is undoutably good, it does not follow that all data
>> published actually conforms to it (for example third party rights in
>> existing data could be an issue).
>>
>> In any case on data.houstontx.gov the licence is specified for 7
>> datasets, so I assume the intent is to do that for all over time (you
>> should ask).
>>
>> The related problem is that you will need to obtain a waiver for CC BY
>> material as CC BY is in many ways more restrictive than the ODbL (see
>> https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/).
>>
>> Simon
>> Am 13.08.2019 um 08:24 schrieb JS:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> The city of Houston has published several open data sets at
>> data.houstontx.gov and cohgis-mycity.opendata.arcgis.com/. While the
>> data sets and open data websites do not contain any licensing-related text,
>> there's a general open data policy at
>> http://www.houstontx.gov/adminpolicies/8-7.html.
>>
>> Am I right to assume that this policy, in particular the definition of
>> "open data" at No 6, is sufficiently clear so as to use the data without
>> further permission?
>>
>> Thanks for your opinions!
>>
>> Best,
>> Jan
>> --
>> Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android-Gerät mit K-9 Mail gesendet.
>>
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