This is a message from Teresa Scassa
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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point, the data set might have to be withdrawn and a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