U.K. Government Develops CC-Like License for Data

As of April Fool’s day, the U.K. Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) has changed its copyright license to something that harmonizes well with a Creative Commons license. After a report on how the public reacted to the traditional Crown copyright notice, OPSI began to develop a license modelled on those used by Creative Commons.

The new license already operates on the impressive data.gov.uk site, the launch of which we reported on Slaw back in January. The following paragraph occurs near the end of the new, plain language license:

Creative Commons

These terms have been aligned to be interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. This means that you may mix the information with Creative Commons licensed content to create a derivative work that can be distributed under any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.

Sadly for Canadians, our government shows no signs of liberating Canadian data in the way that Britain and the United States have done — that is, with gusto and a helping hand to encourage its use and remixing. The current copyright notice on the Statistics Canada site is inadequate to our needs and computer-enhanced abilitites.