Thanks for this Tom, as far as I can see your statement (which I think is what I
understood to be the case previously) slightly conflicts with the sentence ref'd by
'8' here
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_Government_Licence#Applicab… at least,
in tone.
You're saying Crown Copyright materials are OGL unless expressly stated otherwise, or
falling into one of the excluded types (third party, personal data, etc.). The article
currently, and as Fae I think is suggesting, indicates that OGL must be expressly applied.
(Sorry if I'm misreading you Fae, it is of course possible to be "optional"
in the sense that one may "opt out").
If that's right, I'm not sure how to change the text of the article, I'll of
course have a think but perhaps someone else has ideas.
Best
Simon
-----Original Message-----
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tom Morris
Sent: 02 January 2014 16:23
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Open Gov + CC = a marriage of convenience?
The Open Government License is itself just a license. It is basically CC BY with a few
modifications: it deals with EU database rights (which previous versions of CC didn't)
and includes pre-baked conditions on what it doesn't apply to just in case the
government accidentally release a whole load of stuff and fail to do due diligence on what
it contains.
The important bit of the OGL isn't the license itself but the Public Sector
Information (PSI) licensing framework which requires works that are eligible for Crown
Copyright produced by or on behalf of central government to licensed under the OGL. This
applies regardless of whether the work is actually licensed as such.
I don't know whether the Welsh and Scottish governments have done similarly to HM
Government. That's a matter that should really be raised with the local equivalents of
the Cabinet Office.
I've dealt with a lot of OGL-related issues on Commons, and in the process of one DR
consulted with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. You can see the DRs here (and
the first one has an OTRS ticket for my contact with the government lawyers):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Olympic_m…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Canoe_Sla…
There's a page on Meta that I created a while back to track use of OGL material and
document the issues around it (as well as point to templates/categories on sites like
Commons and Wikisource).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Licence
The other thing to consider is that OGL licensing applies on top of other license. If the
government have released an image on Flickr as something like CC BY-ND, you can use the
image under that license (although not on Wikimedia, obviously). But it's also Crown
Copyright, and if it is a work of central government, OGL applies AS WELL AS CC BY-ND. In
the above deletion requests, we've had issues where people have said "Yeah, but
it's CC-BY-ND" because that's what it says on Flickr.
Another caveat is that the proceedings of Parliament are not covered by the OGL. They are
instead covered by the Open Parliamentary Licence. And the proceedings of the Scottish
Parliament are covered by the Open Scottish Parliamentary Licence. The OPL is basically
the same as the OGL but with the word "Parliament" instead of
"Government". The Scottish one is the same except it contains references to the
appropriate Scottish legislation and institutions.
I know a fair bit about this stuff because back in 2011, I worked for a
government-sponsored technology non-profit that existed precisely because of OGL/PSI. The
government could do a much better job of making this stuff clear. (It'd help also if
Flickr let accredited UK Gov agencies apply OGL on images.)
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
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