Data directories/metadata should identify copyright status of the data

[JoshData]

Agencies publishing data directories should take the responsibility of indicating what the copyright status of the data is, namely:

• Is the data a work of the fed govt and in the public domain.
• Is it (or any part of it) copyrighted? By who?
• And if so, are any copyright licenses applied to it? are any of those licenses 'certified' open licenses?

The memorandum should also have addressed the "poison pill" problem of copyright works appearing within government data.

Ideas here are riffed from James Jacobs, see this email: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openhouseproject/x65WlQ_PLfU/v_hHoGAj0-8J

[gbinal]

Hi Josh.

Thanks a bunch for jumping in and driving this focus. I know that there are parallel issue threads that deal with the licenses page, but specific to this issue, the license field in the metadata schema looks to have at least part of this in mind. As far as how the data.json files are set up, how would you see this being published or do you think it's something best addressed outside the data.json file?

[JoshData]

Hey, Gray. Agreed that the schema addresses (part of) this. I'm not sure what an acceptable value is for that field (e.g. CKAN created URI identifiers for particular licenses, if I recall, or is it the name of the license?), but that's the right idea.

The other part of what I was noting was that catalog UIs --- e.g. the Data.govs of the world --- should display this info. Not to say none do, but that this should be emphasized going forward if we're going to have an emphasis on open licenses at all.

Anyway, this issue was just to highlight something I thought was important, but I don't have a concrete idea for where to go from here on the issue.

[mhogeweg]

both FGDC and ISO metadata specifications include various constraints that apply to the resource, ranging from generic 'don't use this road dataset for navigation' to various security classification codes (unclassified - topSecret). check out pull request #74 I submitted today where I've included a mapping between DCAT and these common metadata schemas. something to build on.

[rebeccawilliams]

Does the renaming of accessLevelComment to rights (as part of the metadata v 1.1 updates) and its breadth as discussed in #353 address these concerns?

[gbinal]

It looks like this has been covered by the v1.1 updates as well as recent guidance from OMB to agencies. I think we can close this.