"Open Licenses" does not meet community standards of open government data

[JoshData]

The community standard for open gov data in the U.S. is "license-free" rather than "open licenses." The distinction is subtle but important.

I've written more about it here:

http://razor.occams.info/blog/2013/05/09/new-open-data-memorandum-almost-defines-open-data-misses-mark-with-open-licenses/

And more background in my book:
http://opengovdata.io/2012-02/page/5-1-3/principles-universality-use

[konklone]

Yes, this is correct. Since government information is already public domain to begin with, there is no act of releasing into the public domain that a license needs to accomplish.

To the extent that the government wishes to make it explicit that information is to be free for any kind of use, noncommercial or commercial, or whatever - the Public Domain Mark is the appropriate way to do this. This is more appropriate than even CC0, as CC0 is used to release copyrighted or ambiguous material into the public domain.

I understand there are times when copyright has been assigned to the US, or there are works by contractors in the mix, so it can sometimes be ambiguous. WhiteHouse.gov's Copyright Policy addresses this by applying a CC-BY license only to third-party content, while emphasizing that any WH-produced content is already public domain.

@philipashlock has opened a pull request adding the PDM to the top of the license list in #11. I'd like to see this accepted, though I would also like to see a distinction drawn between licenses appropriate for fully government produced information (which would only be PDM) and licenses appropriate for covering third party material (which the existing entries on the list, such as CC0, could do).

[rufuspollock]

We have to be careful here:

• Non-Federal government data may not be automatically public domain (these documents even if aimed at Federal government may well be used by non-Federal government)
• Even federal data may only be "public domain" in the US. We need open data to be open everywhere not just in a given jurisdiction (see this email and subsequent thread)

Thus I would strongly recommend using proper dedication / license like CCZero or the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL).

[JoshData]

I'm going to close this issue in favor of #257.

In the nine months since opening this issue, @konklone and I worked with a large group of stakeholders to refine the community standards and produce actionable steps for government data owners (see http://theunitedstates.io/licensing/). While I still personally think that M-13-13 and POD took an unfortunate step in attempting to re-define open as something other than license-free, #257 nicely says how agencies can go beyond the minimum requirement of M-13-13-style "open" to achieve the higher standard of "license-free".

(fyi, this is obviously under my advocate hat and not my contractor hat)