[Talk-GB] UK Open Government Licence

[Jonathan]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for that extra info about licensing.  I knew OS were at the route 
of most licensing issues to do with maps of the UK but not in what way, 
so that clears that up for me.

However,  my view would be that if a County Council has issued data 
under a license that we recognise as allowing us to use for our 
purposes, then that is all we need.  Querying the council as to whether 
they actually have the rights to give away said rights is unnecessary, 
confusing for them and us and likely to just breed more confusion over 
the issue.

Even if Norfolk don't have the rights to give them away, that's their 
problem. We acted in good faith that the OGL was valid.

Jonathan

http://bigfatfrog67.me

On 24/01/2014 11:00, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:
> On 24 January 2014 07:29, Bernard Moore <bcmoore at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> Norfolk County Council offer Public Rights of Way data on this page :-
>> http://maps.norfolk.gov.uk/inspire/ (last row of the NCC block).
>> It is issued under Open Government Licence :-
>> http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/ … version/2/
>> These open licence terms are all very confusing (open not always meaning
>> open). Therefore my question is, can I copy the RoW lines from the WMS maps
>> (which open in JOSM) and use the data in OSM?
> If data is indeed offered for re-use under the Open Government
> Licence, then the answer is yes, you can use it in OSM.
>
> If you read to the end of the OGL, you'll find that it helpfully says:
>
> "These terms are compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution
> License 4.0 and the Open Data Commons Attribution License, both of
> which license copyright and database rights. This means that when the
> Information is adapted and licensed under either of those licences,
> you automatically satisfy the conditions of the OGL when you comply
> with the other licence."
>
> So you can be confident that if you have data under the OGL then you
> would have sufficient rights to allow re-distribution under the ODC-By
> licence, which in turn implies it's ok for OSM to distribute it under
> the ODbL.
>
> However, there is one potential problem in this specific case -- and
> that is whether or not Norfolk CC actually have the rights to
> distribute that data under the OGL. The coordinates in the dataset
> will almost certainly have been derived from an Ordnance Survey base
> map. If that's the case then Ordnance Survey claim IP rights in the
> data. While there is a procedure to allow councils to release such
> data, OS insists that it's released under OS's own variant of the OGL,
> the OS OpenData Licence. Unfortunately, this licence is probably not
> compatible with the ODbL, and hence we can't use such data in OSM. See
> http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/os-open-data.html and
> http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/prow/council-gis.html
>
> So before making use of the data, it would be good to get
> clarification from Norfolk CC about whether they own all the IP rights
> to the data and whether they are actually able of offer it under the
> OGL.
>
> If you're interested in Norfolk Rights of Way though, one thing that
> we can definitely use in OSM is the set of Definitive Statements that
> the council maintains. These aren't restricted by OS's IP rights, and
> we have permission to use them under the OGL. See
> http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/prow/norfolk/ .
>
> Robert.
>
> (On the subject of confusing licences, I've long said the OSM's
> Licence Working Group should maintain official lists of "OSM
> compatible" and "OSM incompatible" licences that they've reviewed, in
> order to save mappers continually having to ask these sorts of
> questions and deal with legal interpretations themselves.
> Unfortunately, this doesn't deem to have happened yet.)
>