[Geodata] Geodata License

[Jo Walsh]

dear ominoverde, a quick response that turned into a long one,

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 11:05:25PM +0100, Lorenzo Becchi wrote:
> We are helping an Italian regional administration to release a set of 
> geodata similar to Spearfish.

This sounds wonderful! Will you be looking to publish software setup 
utilities with it in the way Chris did for geoserver config in his
data package? Are there plans to offer this for GRASS/QGIS tutorial
demo material, etc?
 
> We would like to chose one that is well known, good for geodata, prevent 
> commercial use but Free enough to allow academic use and FOSS 
> applications use as demos.
> a "viral" license would be great.

The decision may be unshakeable but I'd still like to ask why limit
the data set to noncommercial use. Is there a separate commercial
license for the same data and is much value exchange anticipated?
http://blog.okfn.org/2006/04/24/removing-the-nc/
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
NC may, for example prevent the distribution of a data package along
with free software if noncommercial use cannot be guaranteed.
And if you have the "viral" ShareAlike clause then improvements to the
data made on a commercial basis come back to the commons of data ... 
I won't press this point or engage in license-chopping, though.

> I've put an eye on the Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
 
> I don't know if it's strong enough or may cause problems of any kind to 
> data access or usage.

Richard Fairhurst's classic blog entry on "ShareAlike considered
harmful" and the commentary on it is worth looking at. 
http://www.systemed.net/blog/entry060311122655.html 
Some of his more recent "gonzo legal" research...
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Case_law

In EU as opposed to US there are issues to do with how much geodata is
covered by database copyright law which is a lot more restrictive here. 
http://www.talis.com/tdn/tcl is an interesting effort to make a
database right rather than copyright inspired open license.
But i would not say it is well known, CC you benefit a lot from
"acceptance".

> 1) is this the right place to talk about this?

Yes i think it is *one* of the right places :) Certainly one of the
Geodata Committee's goals is "to present and explain information about
open geodata licensing" and these sort of questions should help
generate an FAQ on the website. 

There was also the discussion list for the Public Geodata License 
but i dont know if that is still running, after the assumption of
Ottawa Grass Users Group into OSGeo chapter. The PGL IMO never really
got to a usable 1.0, at least not the English language version.
Dave Sampson may have a better picture of this than me. 

Others to approach on an advice-gathering expedition would be the
geodatacommons project - i recall they had all CC flavours as default
options for licensing data into their commons service - or the
legal-talk list at Openstreetmap - in both those cases i think it's
best to go with a discussion/decision draft and ask specific feedback :)

I probably have just rendered this more rather than less complex for
you and will stop writing. Yours is great news though, please keep in
the loop for when the data is ready for inclusion in the OSGeo geodata
repository :) And might it also be worth sending a press release about
this? This was one piece of feedback i got from Malte Halbey at
FOSSGIS in re publicgeodata, that more press releases on this issue
would be well received. Are you already connected to
http://www.freegis-italia.org/ ... ? 

cheers,


jo
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