As we announced in January the OKF has adopted the Open Data Commons project.
As part of the project Jordan Hatcher has been working on a new Open Database License (ODbL) – which went into beta at the end of last month:
The Open Database Licence (ODbL) is a licence agreement intended to allow you to freely share,
modify, and use this Database while maintaining this same freedom for others. Many databases are
covered by copyright, and therefore this document licenses these rights. Some jurisdictions, mainly
in Europe, have specific rights that cover databases, and so the ODbL addresses these rights, too.
Finally, the ODbL is also an agreement in contract for you to act in certain ways in return for
accessing this Database.
If you’d like to comment on the license, there’s a draft up at:
Also – if you’d like to discuss or keep up to date with the Open Data Commons project, you can join the mailing list.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
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