Previously[1] I looked at the OGL - Canada 2.0. The federal government opinion is that the license is compatible with the ODbL and CC BY. The OKFN regards the OGL - Canada 2.0 as meeting the Open Definition.
The OGL - British Columbia and OGL - Nanaimo are different licenses. Aside from formatting, branding and jurisdictional differences, the two significant changes are the addition of an exemption, and defining "Information" to include "Records"[2]. The exception is to not license "Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.) [(FIPPA)]" Although it has not come up for a vote, the view on the Open Definition mailing lists[3] is that this exemption makes the license non-open because it is impossible or impractical for a user to know if the license is applied to a particular work, or if it falls under one of the exemptions. The vagueness comes from two sources: difficulty in interpreting what is meant in the license, and difficulty evaluating if a particular work falls under a FIPPA exemption. I have more information about the possible interpretations of this phrase and different types of FIPPA exemptions, but see no need to go into that at this time. If it were not for this exemption, I do not see anything that would cause its ODbL compatibility to differ from the OGL - Canada 2.0. Fortunately, there is a way around the vagueness of the exemption: to find out the FOI status explicitly. I asked the City of Nanaimo about the orthophotos, addressing and roads data and their FOI officer informed me that I may treat those datasets as "released 'in accordance with the Provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act'". This does NOT apply to all Nanaimo datasets, nor to other datasets released by other cities under similar licenses. I would *expect* all datasets on data catalogue sites in BC to be released in accordance with FIPPA, but I believe it is necessary to verify this. I have no import-related plans at this time for the addressing or roads data, but I've had multiple requests to make the orthophotos available as a background for editing, as they are significantly better than Bing. I may do an overlay with the roads data, similar to the TIGER 2013 overlay, or what I did for Kelowna[4]. Kelowna's data is under the PDDL, which made it legally much easier to work with. The effort involved in verifying that a license used only by one city is usable shows how custom licenses significantly increase the work for data consumers (e.g. OpenStreetMap), particularly if multiple data sources are involved. It would be significantly easier if the data was released following best practices and used an established license such as, in order of preference: CC0, PDDL, CC BY 4.0, or ODC-BY. [1]: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2013-November/007668.ht ml [2]: https://gist.github.com/pnorman/7716944 [3]: https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2013-October/000633.html [4]: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/kelowna.html _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
