[CivicAccess-discuss] Montréal disposera de la licence ouverte CC BY 4. Une pr emière au Canada en matières de données ouvertes. Un avantage pour les citoye première au Canada en matières de données ouvertes. Un avantage pour les citoyens
Kent Mewhort
kent at openissues.ca
Sun Feb 23 03:57:19 AEDT 2014
I have to disagree. I think it could be a slippery slope to waive these
clauses off as boilerplates that are never likely to apply because the
goverment is vetting the information anyways. In this case, the
licensor is saying "trust me", while shifting all the legal risk,
business risk and uncertainties for a failure of this trust onto the user.
An Teresa mentioned, FIPPA "laws are there to govern what government's
disclose". The must-not-release clauses in FIPPA create obligations on
governments to withhold certain classes of information. However, when
brought into a license, the legal implications change dramatically.
Rather than being obligations on the government, they change into
obligations on the USER to vet and not use these classes of information
-- at risk of being in violation of crown copyright.
The scope of these exemption clauses are also actually very different
between different licenses. While the clauses are relatively narrow in
the UK OGL 2.0, the Ontario and BC OGLs pull in pages and pages of
exemptions from FIPPA legislation. The potential exclusions carry well
past the scenario of a particular datasets violating an individuals
privacy rights. I won't rehash the discussion of these issues on the OD
list, but a couple of entry points to these threads can be found here
<https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2013-December/000740.html>
and here
<https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/2013-July/000532.html>.
All said, a big congratulations to Montreal and Quebec for moving away
from these uncertainties!
Kent
On 14-02-21 03:40 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
> From Teresa,
>
> (We,re trying to figure ou the list problem)
>
>
>
>
> On 2014-02-21, at 5:32 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
>
>> This is a message from Teresa Scassa
>> *****************************************************
>>
>> From: Teresa Scassa
>> Sent: February-21-14 8:18 AM
>> To: civicaccess discuss; gerry at tychon.ca
>> Subject: RE: [CivicAccess-discuss] Montréal disposera de la
>> licence ouverte CC BY 4. Une pr emière au Canada en matières de
>> données ouvertes. Un avantage pour les citoye première au Canada
>> en matières de données ouvertes. Un avantage pour les citoyens
>>
>> I'm not sure that it is necessary to know much more about the
>> referenced legislation in these government licences, so I don't
>> agree that these clauses make the licences particularly more
>> complex from a user's point of view. These clauses are
>> boilerplate CYA clauses for government - (there's one in the UK
>> open licence as well). Governments are not allowed to provide,
>> as open data, any of the information that is excluded from
>> disclosure under (in this case) provincial access to information
>> and protection of privacy legislation. So this type of
>> information should simply not be in the open data set in the
>> first place. The clauses are there in an attempt to limit
>> governments' own liability should, by some internal error, they
>> provide a data set containing data they were not legally allowed
>> to make public. Each province will have a slightly different
>> clause because each province has its own legislation, which may
>> have a different title. But the principle is the same in each case.
>>
>> Even if a user knew these laws inside out they would probably
>> have no way of knowing whether the data in the data set was a
>> third party's confidential business information, to use one
>> example. The laws are there to govern what government's disclose.
>> Knowledge of the law is thus more or less unnecessary, and in my
>> view, these clauses don't have much of an impact on users and
>> shouldn't create any incompatibilities between licences. The only
>> scenario where there might be a problem is if a citizen
>> complained that a particular data set violated their privacy
>> rights (or a company complained that a particular set contained
>> its confidential business information) and an adjudicator or
>> court ruled that this was indeed the case. At that point, the
>> data set might have to be withdrawn and a user of the data set
>> would not be licenced to use the problematic data.
>>
>> Teresa
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:25 PM, David Eaves <david at eaves.ca> wrote:
>>
>> So my understanding is that the BC license is different - but
>> all the others are the same. That is certainly the intention
>> that they all be identical accept the title which references
>> the jurisdiction. (again except BC which is frustrating).
>>
>> Of course, now that there is a group of governments aligned
>> around the license, you can send them feedback about how they
>> could make them identical. I think they are interested in
>> hearing this.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 20, 2014, at 2:05 PM, James McKinney
>> <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:
>>
>> > Yes, they are different licenses.
>> >
>> > I just spoke to Kent Mewhort, who explained that there are
>> other differences between the licenses. For example, BC [1]
>> has an additional exemption which makes it a more problematic
>> license: "This license does not grant you any right to use:
>> (b) Information or Records not accessible under the Freedom
>> of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (B.C.);".
>> Ontario [2] has a similar exemption: "This licence does not
>> grant you any right to use: (b) Information or Records not
>> accessible under the Freedom of Information and Protection of
>> Privacy Act (Ontario);" Alberta [3] has its own vague
>> exemption: "This licence does not grant you any right to use:
>> (b) Information or Records that are not accessible under
>> applicable laws;".
>> >
>> > The licenses, on the surface, look the same, but those
>> one-line differences actually make the licenses quite
>> complex, given that you need to know a fair amount about the
>> referenced/imported legislation.
>> >
>> > 1.
>> http://www.data.gov.bc.ca/local/dbc/docs/license/OGL-vbc2.0.pdf
>> > 2.
>> http://www.ontario.ca/government/open-government-licence-ontario
>> > 3.
>>
>
>
> --
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
> https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
> http://datalibre.ca/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> CivicAccess-discuss at civicaccess.ca
> http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
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