5. Data Licensing

Open data is available to be used, reused, and redistributed by anyone. However, open data is still protected by a copyright license which may establish conditions for use. It’s important to understand a dataset’s license before using it. Doing so will prevent copyright violations and potential legal ramifications.

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy and distribute a creative work, usually for a limited time. The owner of a database may give permission for others to use the work through a copyright license, an explicit authorization from the copyright owner to a licensee to use the work under specific terms and conditions.

The Reimagine 911 team inspected the licenses of all the datasets in our Open Data Review. We found a wide variety of cases:

Fig. 5.1 Many different licenses were found, though it was most common that the data provider did not specify any licensing information at all.

Open Data and Copyright

Although open data is available for public use, it’s often protected by an open license. Some open licenses explicitly state that the data is free to use, adapt, distribute, and publish. Other open licenses state that users are free to do these things as long as attribution is given to the creator and/or as long as the licensee publishes any modifications they’ve made to the data.

Here is an overview of the licenses that the Reimagine 911 team encountered most often:

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons licenses are some of the most widely used open licenses. Some examples include:

• CC0 (aka CC Zero): A public dedication tool, in which creators give up their copyright and put their works into the worldwide public domain. CC0 allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, with no conditions. Adaptation is key to the ability to analyze data and publish results from that analysis.

• CC BY (or CC-BY): This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. (BY means that attribution is required.)

The creative commons licenses can incorporate different properties to further specify how they may be used. These properties include:

• SA (ShareAlike): Adaptations must be shared under the same terms as the original.

• NC (NonCommercial): Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.

• ND (NoDerivatives): No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.

Open Data Commons Licenses

The Open Data Commons has similar licenses to Creative Commons licenses. The most common ODC licenses used are:

• ODC-PDDL: The Open Data Commons Public Domain and Dedication License permits adaptation, creation, and distribution, and imposes no restrictions. This is similar to CC0.

• ODC-BY: The Open Data Commons Attributions License permits adaptation, creation, and distribution as long as you provide attribution. This is similar to CC-BY.

• ODC-ODbL: The Open Data Commons Open Database License permits adaptation, creation, and distribution as long as you keep the database open, share-alike under the ODbL license, and provide attribution. This license is uniquely specific to databases.

Fair Use License

Fair use is a concept in the copyright system that allows for certain unauthorized uses of protected materials, provided they are beneficial to public education and the public interest. Fair use specifically covers reproductions for the purposes of criticism, opinion, reporting, education, and scholarship.

Although it is possible to argue the right to use a creative work through fair use, the creator also has the right to fight this claim through legal means. Anyone planning to use content under fair use should consider their justification carefully.

Public Domain

A number of datasets are published as “Public Domain”. Public domain is technically not a license, but a designation that means that the data is donated to the public domain and all rights are relinquished.

No License

It is generally accepted that if no license is specified, no one has the right to use, share, distribute, re-post, add to, transform, or change the work.

The Reimagine 911 team reviewed a total of 151 data licenses and found that approximately two-thirds of datasets reviewed do not have an open license or did not provide any licensing information at all (Fig. 5.2).

Fig 5.2 Two-thirds of datasets reviewed do not have an open license

Multiple Licenses

You may notice that Figure 5.1 refers to 151 data licenses, while Reimagine 911 reviewed 127 datasets. This was due to two reasons:

1. Datasets may have multiple licenses if the data and its contents are licensed separately. For example, there may be “No license” for the data and an ODC-ODbL license for the database.

2. The same municipality may use different licenses for different datasets in different years.

If you would like to look at the number and distribution of license types for each city’s datasets, please see this License Count by Type document.