I Send you a link of a post about spatial data license in Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)

http://www.orbemapa.com/2008/11/inspire-y-las-licencias-de-uso-de-los.html

I hope it´ s useful for discussion.

http://highearthorbit.com/does-the-opendatabase-license-need-cc-style-modules/#comment-213522

Response?

Thank you for the insightful feedback. My point here was less about potential shortcomings of the ODbL. I’m aware of the very hard work that went into making it. Momentum is forward moving with the license and it will be a great shake-out of issues and open data applications.

My goal was to raise the issue that the ODbL is a specific use-case, and one that doesn’t apply to other options for how data is opened. Organizations need various ways and mechanisms to open data.

Open-Source licenses are varied, and wild, but at least there is a corpus of well understood licenses. So nominally users of the software know what GPL implies vs. Apache. This isn’t the case with data licenses that are unique each and every time.

So even with ODbL, we’ll still see data being released under unique licenses if it, for example, doesn’t need to be share-alike, or can only be used “non-commercial”, etc.

Try just reading the GPL or Apache License and tell me if it would make sense without the cultural context and years of experience in open source software.

CC have done a great job at making licensing accessible to non-experts, kudos.

The OKFN is actually doing a great job of engaging the community, answering questions, clarifying confusing points. The most simple human readable view of the license is below.

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/

As you point out, CC offer one extreme for open data. ODbL offers another. As for modularization, there are compelling arguments against this, due to the differences in data. But yes, we’ll see, all part of an evolutionary process that has already made pretty great strides.

It looked like much care was taken to make it clear the extent to which “Produced Works” are not subject to any “viral” style ShareAlike conditions; only when using the entire database in public in a systematic way does one become obliged to contribute improvements to the data.

From the ODbL text at http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/ :
“Notice for using output (Contents). Creating and Using a Produced Work does not require the notice in Section 4.2 [conveying the license and indicating compliance with its terms]. However, if you Publicly Use a Produced Work, You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this License.”

A long time was taken to hit the balance between public domain and ShareAlike advocates, many rounds of consultation with the OSM community in particular. ODbL holds up. It fits the Open Definition – http://opendefinition.org/1.0/ . Nothing is perfect, but it looks like a good candidate license.

Problems with assertion of any kind of licence rights for research data include incompatibility between different licence formulations preventing data from being combined or mashed up; and the irony that restrictions to non-commercial uses may hinder retention of data in cases where eventual preservation approaches have a commercial component.

Relying on community norms rather than a legal tack can achieve fair attribution without tying the data up. See also http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/ which I’ll quote (section 4.1):

“The conflict between simplicity and legal certainty can be best resolved by a twofold measure: 1) a reconstruction of the public domain and 2) the use of scientific norms to express the wishes of the data provider.

“Reconstructing the public domain can be achieved through the use of a legal tool (waiving the relevant rights on data and asserting that the provider makes no claims on the data).

“Requesting behavior, such as citation, through norms rather than as a legal requirement based on copyright or contracts, allows for different scientific disciplines to develop different norms for citation. This allows for legal certainty without constraining one community to the norms of another.”

Data licensing is hard. When you say you want licences “that would allow anyone to easily demarcate the terms of the data they are releasing”, yeah, I agree. I also want a pony. Try actually writing that in a way that applies both to Rural vs Feist and sweat-of-the-brow jurisdictions…

in the online advertising world, similar challenges exist for data sharing, reporting, revenue attribution et al.

from my perspective, this will continue to grow into a larger challenge with companies trying to build more and more semantic technologies. if you recall the speech given by Tim-Berners-Lee at TED in 2009, he is inviting the next set of companies and technologies to exploit semantic data and build meaning.

to allow this next wave of innovation, the hurdles for new ideas to get access to data have to be minimized.

would love to work on a framework, and contribute ideas

JH