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