[Talk-us] State Open Data

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Thank you very much for these additional clarifications, Brian.  It may take years, it may take several court cases, it may take fifty state legislatures and courts and federal appeals and circuits to assert this, it may take Attorneys General educating county clerks who try to assert copyright (improperly, even illegally), it may even take DECADES of effort in open data/open source projects like OSM and we, the good People and Citizen Mappers who believe in this stuff and continue to knock on doors, send emails and make phone calls to our elected folks.  But the bottom line is that slowly, surely, we here in the fifty states of the USA enjoy fairly free-and-open geographic data from which we are able to make excellent maps.  (OK, ask around, check your state and/or county to be sure).  Harmoniously, together, sharing the best knowledge/data we have, coupled with the power of government resources wisely spent and our volunteer spirit working for the highest good of awesome geography, OSM continues to rock the mapping world.  Yeah!

Keep up the great work, everybody.  I know I am seriously dedicated to this project long term.

SteveA
California


> On Aug 14, 2018, at 1:30 PM, Brian May <bmay at mapwise.com> wrote:
> This may have been stated already, but just wanted to make it clear - State laws on public records filter down through all regional and local governments operating within the state. So if state law doesn't explicitly give a county permission to copyright data, and the county tries to assert copyright, the county is violating state law. If you can get a hold of the data, you can ignore whatever the county says. If you can't get the data and must get it from the agency through formal channels, you need to send a letter and explain the situation. If they don't respond favorably, try the state Attorney General's office. In Florida, the Attorney General weighed in on this issue in the mid-2000s because counties weren't getting the message after a court case clarified the that public records could not be copyrighted or sold at exorbitant prices in Florida for "cost recovery". At that time the Attorney General's office had an open records advocate that would help educate, communicate, and mediate with local governments about public records laws.

>> On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 1:05 PM OSM Volunteer stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
>>> I'm not an attorney, though were I to attempt to sharpen focus on these two replies, I'd say that in California, it's more like this:  data produced by state agencies (by our state government personnel "on the clock") publishing them as "produced by the state of California" cannot have onerous copyright terms/restrictions put upon them.  They simply "belong to the public."  (This is especially true of GIS data, as in the County of Santa Clara and Orange County/Sierra Club cases).
>>> 
>>> So when you say "copyright...owned by the government," that is effectively equivalent to "copyright owned by the People of the state" because of California's Open Data laws and stare decisis (law determined by court precedence/findings).  Whether "public domain" is the correct legal term I'm not sure, but if there is a distinction between the legality of California-produced data and "the data are in the public domain" it is either very subtle or completely non-existent; I consider California-produced data "somewhere around, if not actually PD" and "fully ODbL-compatible" for OSM purposes.  So, (and I hope this dispels any confusion and answers your question, Pine), "created by the government" means they can't put "onerous copyright" on it, meaning it is effectively owned by the People for any purpose for which We see fit.
<remainder redacted for brevity, as brevity is the soul of wit>