Open Data Commons

Thinh Nguyen, Counsel for Science Commons, has posted a piece on free and open data to the Science Commons site. In it, he references our work on the Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

Freedom to Research: Keeping Scientific Data Open, Accessible, and Interoperable [PDF]

Science Commons blog post announcement: Nguyen on keeping data open and free.

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Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking on open data, law, and licensing at State of the Map on 12-13 July in Limerick, Ireland. State of the Map is the annual conference for Open Street Map.

Registration is now open.

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Public Domain Dedication and Licence v.1.0 

The new materials are up!  The first draft has been archived and links to the original text will be posted.  I’ve just updated the page that the PDDL was originally on. The Community Norms statement was not updated.

CHANGELOG - PDDL

Added various text in the preamble in order to clarify it a bit.

Deleted “Database Directive” definition and incorporated it into “Database Right” definition as was only used in the database right definition.

New 2.2, old 2.2 changed to 2.3.  New 2.2 as outlined in blog post below with some amendments: Proposed additional clause post
Include “completeness” after “accuracy” in Section 5.1

There is no FAQ up detailing use — the Open Data Commons project is a volunteer effort at this time and so a FAQ will be forthcoming as we are able to devote time to it. Thanks however must go to Talis for sponsoring the initial draft creation.

Please do not link to the PDDL text as a means of using it: Copy the text to your own site or place it in the file as appropriate after you’ve consulted with appropriate counsel about using the document.

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At the Open Knowledge Convention in London on Saturday, March 15th, I will make a short presentation on the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence and announce its release out of beta. By the end of the day on Monday I will have all the changes finished and up on OpenDataCommons.org. A detailed FAQ will still be in the works, as this project at the moment is volunteer led. If you’d like to contribute a FAQ or to financially support the development of a FAQ and additional materials, please contact support ]at[ this site’s name.org. Thanks!

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Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons project

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Perhaps surprisingly for some, data and databases are not a ‘rights free’ area where no intellectual property rights apply. Open Data Commons was started to provided free and open source software and Creative Commons style licensing solutions for data — open data. The legal tools being developed have implications both in terms of open access to scientific research and in enabling the semantic web. This talk will discuss the Open Data Commons legal tool — the Public Domain Dedication & Licence — and place this work within the greater context of open access and new generations of web tools.

About the speaker

Jordan Hatcher is a lawyer and researcher with a focus on intellectual property and Internet law, especially issues surrounding open licensing solutions such as Creative Commons and open data. He has a JD in law from the University of Texas, and a, LLM in IP and IT law from the University of Edinburgh. Jordan is also the author, together with Dr Charlotte Waelde, of the Open Data Commons set of legal tools.

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FYI, Richard Poynder’s interview with John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, is available and discusses open data.

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[Science Commons]Netsquared hosts data mashup challenge

If you’re interested in open data or open notebook science, listen up. Netsquared is putting its money where its mouth is and offering a $100,000 cash prize for the best data mashups for social change.

You can find out more on their site.

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Creative Commons has announced a change in course for CCZero with reference to the approach taken byOpen Data Commons and the Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

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Some things I’ve been reading that should be of interest. There is a great deal more that I’ll put up soon.

Read the history of open data in Richard Poydner’s “Peter Murray-Rust and the data-mining robots“. Indeed, without Peter Murray-Rust, we wouldn’t have the Open Data Commons project.

Speaking of Murray-Rust, you can listen to a Talking to Talis podcast with him and read Richard Poynder’s interview with him.

And crossposted from opencontentlawyer:

Report on Ordnance Survey licensing practices. Free Our Data covers in this post the report from the Commons Select Committee on Communities and Local Government looking into Ordnance Survey’s licensing and business model.

Ordnance Survey is Britain’s national mapping agency. Due to UK government works being able to have IP rights over their work, if OS or some other agency wants to make their work public domain, they’d need some tool such as the PDDL to do it.

Podcast with John Wilbanks. The head of Science Commons talks with Ellen Duranceau of MIT Libraries News about SC and open data.

Also, Sophie L. Rovner “It’s All About Access” Chemical and Engineering News.

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“It won’t be long before open access is old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on unrestricted access to research literature and data. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story. But historians will note that they all depend on open access and that open access was not easily won.” Peter Suber

Free and libre/open source software (F/LOSS) movements have spawned similar solutions in many other contexts, each at differing stages of development. As F/LOSS enters the routine and familiarity of middle age, the open content movement–open source for non-software copyright and best embodied by the work of Creative Commons –has just graduated university and is getting a feel for the world. Even younger is the open data movement, whose legal tools have just started to come online.

And with that, starts a new article I’ve written for the Open Source Business Resource, which is now available in the February issue. Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project

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