Legal Standards: Boring, Necessary
Timothy Vollmer | Creative Commons | @tvol
Digital sharing = easy as hell Copyright = automatic, have to ask permission, painful
Licenses
Public Domain Tools
CC0 Public Domain Dedication
Public Domain Mark
Sweet spot
Anatomy of a CC license
Human readable deed
Lawyer readable code
Machine readable metadata
Cities are sharing data. But how? 1. publishing online 2. releasing in useable, machine-readable formats 3. explaining what it is (metadata) 4. legal standards!
● Assumption: if government data is not clearly marked as legally open it will be used less
● Need for legal clarity ● Or else! chilling effects ● Legal problems = huge timesuck ● Make it invisible ● Posting online not enough ● Put in public domain or attach open license ● Machine-readable license ● It’s not so difficult!
Why legal standards in the first place?
● No restrictions on use ● License free ● Public domain ● CC0 ● CC BY is default ● Most open licensing
terms available ● Enable commercial reuse ● Open Definition is
baseline
Various legal principles for open data
Minimize restrictions,
maximize reuse.
● Efficient reuse; don’t have to ask permission ● Effective gov’t spending of public money ● Citizen participation, collaboration, transparency? ● Promote creativity, innovation, unexpected uses and
apps ● Spur economic activity ● Internal gov access!
What is enabled by clarifying legal standards?
● Oakland - standard license (CC0, some N/A) ● San Francisco - standard (CC0, some N/A) ● Vancouver - custom license ● Toronto - custom license ● Boston - custom license ● Paris - custom license ● Helsinki - custom license ● D.C. - terms of use ● NYC - terms of use ● London - terms of use ● Chicago - terms of use ● Hong Kong - terms of use
How do cities adopt legal standards?
Maximal openness includes clearly labeling public information as a work of the government and available without restrictions on use as part of the public domain.
Legal principles for open data (2007)
RESOLVED: The City of Oakland shall license any Open Data it publishes for free re-use to ensure clarity of copyright without legal responsibility or liability for publishing such data...
Oakland Open Data Policy
So what should we do?
• Push for most progressive policies possible, as fewer restrictions leads to increased reuse
• CC0 to waive copyright worldwide • Open Definition as baseline
o means, reuse for any purpose (even commercial), with at most requirement to attribute and sharealike
Graphics Credits
● Question Icon - by Rémy Médard, from The Noun Project - CC BY
This work is dedicated to the public domain. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Attribution is optional, but if desired, please attribute to Creative Commons. Some content such as screenshots may appear here under exceptions and limitations to copyright and trademark law--such as fair use--and may not be covered by CC0