Introducing the draft Open Data Commons – Databases licence
This licence was inspired by the Talis Community Licence, and draws heavily from the work of others in the open source, free software, and open content community. Many of the ideas and phrases from the licence are derived from the unported Creative Commons licences, the Creative Commons Scotland set of licences, and we owe the many contributors to these licences a debt of gratitude. It was drafted by myself, Jordan Hatcher, and by Dr. Charlotte Waelde of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. We owe another round of thanks to Talis for sponsoring this project.
This licence covers copyright and database rights over databases. It doesn’t cover the rights over the contents of the database — this is so that the licence can be useful for databases that have contents with different sets of rights. More on this aspect can be found in this post, “Thoughts on drafting an open data licence“.
The posting of the licence is the first step in what will hopefully be an ongoing conversation about the development of the licence. Many more posts will follow this one, as well as conversations on a variety of websites and blogs.
Open Data Home — This is the homepage for links and resources for the licence.
Open Database Licence — The draft version of the licence itself. This is the core licence applied for databases.
Open Data Factual info licence — This is a supplemental licence for those that deal with factual information, or for copyrighted works that the Licensors want to allow as broad a use as possible. This licence is included because of the separation of ‘Data’ and ‘Database’ in the main licence.
Open Data blog posts — Does what it says on the tin — all the blog posts on this site in the category ‘Open Data’.
There is a discussion list for the licence, which you can sign up for here:
http://lists.opencontentlawyer.com/listinfo.cgi/tcl-discuss-opencontentlawyer.com
Thanks and looking forward to your comments.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » Talis licence for Open Data // Sep 24, 2007 at 5:46 pm
[...] Jordan posted the latest draft of this license (now going by the name ‘Open Data Commons‘), some rationale, and pointers to various [...]
2 gmane.org.fsf.europe.discussion // Sep 26, 2007 at 12:16 pm
[...] an open data licence to try to cover this. Is this useful for free software or not? Introduction: http://www.opencontentlawyer.com/2007/09/24/open-data-commons-licence-now-out/ Draft: http://www.opencontentlawyer.com/open-data/open-database-licence/ Discussion list: [...]
3 Notional Slurry » links for 2007-09-27 // Sep 27, 2007 at 6:19 am
[...] Open Data Commons – Licence now out (tags: openness licensing lawyers copyright data database commons) [...]
4 snellspace.com » Blog Archive » Open Data Commons // Oct 11, 2007 at 3:30 am
[...] not exactly sure how I missed this one, but this is definitely an area that anyone in the content syndication and mashup space needs to [...]
5 ravi // Nov 29, 2007 at 9:58 am
this is not a comment.but I want to know how we get the drafting license.please give me the information about it.It’s better Sri Lanka’s drafting license.thank you
6 Jordan // Nov 29, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Thanks for the ‘not a comment’ Ravi. The draft licence is available through the link at the top. If you have any other questions, let me know.