What licence is appropriate for Open Data from MELODIES?

[jonblower]

I've heard that the Creative Commons licences aren't really suitable for data, even though they are often used. But I'd like to know exactly why not! Are there better licences we could use?

[conradbielski]

Hi Jon,something that I learned form the survey was the Share alike license:Share-alike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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| Share-alike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaShare-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the ... |
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This could be an option.Conrad
From: Jon Blower [email protected]
To: ec-melodies/melodies-all [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:55 PM
Subject: [melodies-all] What licence is appropriate for Open Data from MELODIES? (#10)

I've heard that the Creative Commons licences aren't really suitable for data, even though they are often used. But I'd like to know exactly why not! Are there better licences we could use?—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[andrea-perego]

Hello everybody.

The short answer: CC licences, starting from v4.0, can be safely used also for data.

You can find an explanation here:

• CC 4.0 and Open Data (Open Data Institute blog)
• Data (Creative Commons wiki)

As you can read there, the problem with CC licences earlier than 4.0 was that they were not addressing the so called "sui generis database rights" (which, by the way, are ensured by EU legislation).

As a consequence, "localised" version of CC licences ("ports") were developed to use them also for data - with the result of loosing interoperability. And this was also why the OKFN developed Open Data Commons licences - which are basically CC licences for data.

With CC 4.0 this has changed, as mentioned earlier.

About the use of CC licences for data in the EU, there's a notice published by the European Commission - Guidelines on recommended standard licences, datasets and charging for the reuse of documents (note that "documents" here means documents as well as data) -, where the use of CC0 is encouraged (see Section 2.2: Open licences).

This notice is reflecting the results of a public consultation on this topic, where at the question "Which are the preferable standard licences?" more than 70% of the respondents said: CC.

Hope this helps.

PS: The Commission's notice mentioned above reports also another result that may be relevant to MELODIES, concerning the "five thematic dataset categories [...] in highest demand from re-users across the EU" (see Section 3.1: Categories of data – priorities for release). At the first two places we have "geospatial data" and "earth observation and environment", followed by "transport data", "statistics", and "companies".

[jonblower]

Thanks Andrea, that's really helpful indeed!