This is a message from Teresa Scassa
*****************************************************
From: Teresa Scassa
Sent: February-21-14 8:18 AM
To: civicaccess discuss;
[hidden email]
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be withdrawn and a user of the data set would not be licenced to use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