Verify open licensing of GridPath RA Toolkit thermal derate data

[zaneselvans]

- [x] Discuss criteria for safe open data licensing with Creative Commons
- [x] Discuss licensing with Lex Plan Law
- [ ] If we can integrate, update the upstream licensing file in the original GridPath RA Toolkit archive
- [ ] If we can integrate, update Zenodo archive to include thermal derates

[zaneselvans]

Based on the discussion with McCoy Smith / Lex Pan Law, I feel much more comfortable about working with the WECC (and ISO) derived data.

• The 1991 Feist decision by the US Supreme Court (Wikipedia, SCOTUS)
• See also: Assessment Technologies vs. Wiredata which expanded on the Feist decision.

Summary

• The Feist decision found that “collections of facts” are not protected by copyright in the US, unless there's some creativity & originality involved and thus far, nobody has found any.
• Furthermore, if data is published openly, you can’t claim that it’s a trade secret, and federal copyright law preempts state-level contract law. Assessment Technologies vs. Wiredata found that attempting to control the use of publicly available uncopyrightable data by attaching copyright-like rights to it through a contract or licensing agreement is a misuse of copyright.
• Note that because of the EU database directive and the sui generis database intellectual property right that it creates, users of this data in the EU (e.g. the Open Energy Transition folks in Germany) could in theory be sued for using this data, as is technically the case for US Government data (since the USG is only prohibited from holding copyright in the US).
• If we or our open modeling inputs partners wanted to have McCoy write up some actual legal advice and background on this we could.