unitedstates / licensing

Best practices language for making open government data "license-free".
https://theunitedstates.io/licensing/
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
27 stars 5 forks source link

Incumbent to determine s/intellectual property/copyright/ status? #15

Closed JoshData closed 6 years ago

JoshData commented 10 years ago

As Joe Hall pointed out over email, we say:

It is incumbent on the agency to attempt to determine the
intellectual property status of any work it publishes as open data.

which perhaps over-stepped the intended bounds of the document which is primarily copyright, and at least definitely not patents. We may want to revise this to:

It is incumbent on the agency to attempt to determine the
copyright status of any work it publishes as open data.

That said, we do say that "license-free" applies to "copyright and similar laws". In version 1 we said "copyright, trademark, and similar laws". The 8 Principles says "copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation."

I think we sort of intentionally hedged on trademark. If trademarks owned by the government appear throughout a dataset in such a way that replication of the dataset would be difficult, I'd be fine to say that that data is not license-free. In other cases I'm not sure. So maybe we want to keep in a hedge, or address trademark specifically.

This is for a version 3.