Guide to Open Data Licensing

Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and update it:

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it — something that had also become apparent following on from Jo’s post back in April on copyright not being applicable to geodata).

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.

This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes.

Related posts:

1. Open Data Discussion on SPARC List I was recently involved in some interesting discussion with John Wilbanks on the SPARC open-data list and thought it worth excerpting some of this here. Email 1: Reply to a message from John Wilbanks Source: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OpenData/Message/100.html Hi all, chiming in...
2. Open Knowledge Definition Released Following extensive discussion of the first draft we are pleased to announce the public release of the Open Knowledge Definition. A space has also been created on wiki for the Definition which anyone may edit and improve....
3. Alpha Site Up As of last weekend there is a alpha version of the registry up at: http://alpha.publicdomainworks.net/ If all went well Tom Chance demoed this at the iCommons summit in Rio de Janeiro. The database system and its interface is in alpha...