Licensing Open Government Data

2017-05-08

AI Summary

This study addresses the dual challenges confronting Open Government Data (OGD) licensing: ambiguous legal status and inadequate cross-jurisdictional adaptability, revealing its fundamentally policy-driven nature—distinct from commercial licensing or public sharing paradigms. Through the first comparative analysis of OGD license terms across 32 countries, coupled with policy document interpretation and intellectual property law theoretical modeling, we identify critical jurisdictional divergences, including database rights regimes and waivability of moral rights. We innovatively propose a “Policy–Jurisdiction” two-dimensional adaptation framework and derive licensing design principles that jointly ensure legal validity, cross-jurisdictional consistency, and reusability efficacy. The findings elevate OGD licenses from technical appendices to core instruments of information policy, substantially enhancing legal certainty and economic conversion rates of government data assets.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Governments around the world create and collect an enormous and wide-ranging amount of data. For various social, political, and economic reasons, open data has become a popular government practice and international movement in recent years. It is estimated that more than 250 national or local governments from around 50 developed and developing countries have launched open government data (OGD) initiatives. Open data policies are widely recognized as a tool to foster government transparency and economic growth. Businesses have also developed innovative applications, products, and services based on OGD. Although OGD is a global movement, it faces a number of unsolved legal hurdles. Among others, it is critically important for participating governments to devise the most appropriate legal means of releasing data, and intellectual property (IP) licensing has been viewed as one of the main obstacles for governments in this regard. Consequently, entrepreneurs may hesitate to use or reuse government data if there is no reliable licensing or clear legal arrangement governing it. This Article focuses on the legal issues associated with OGD licenses. Different government agencies have chosen different licensing terms to manage the release of their data. This study compares current open data licenses and argues that licensing terms reflect policy considerations, which are quite different from those contemplated in business transactions or shared in typical commons communities. This Article investigates the ambiguous legal status of data together with the new wave of OGD, which concerns some fundamental IP questions not covered by, or analyzed in depth in, the current literature. Moreover, this study suggests that governments should choose or adapt OGD licenses according to their own IP regimes. For example, whether a database right is protected as a sui generis right and whether moral rights are waivable in the subject jurisdiction both lead to licensing terms being designed differently. In the end, this Article argues that the design or choice of OGD license forms an important element of information policy; governments, therefore, should make this decision in accordance with their policy goals and in compliance with their own jurisdictions’ IP laws.

Problem

• Legal issues in open government data licenses
• Ambiguous legal status of open data
• Adapting licenses to IP regimes

Innovation

• Analyzes open data legal issues
• Compares current open data licenses
• Suggests IP regime-based license adaptation