Data Licencing

(This section is summarized from the Compendium on Licensing of Geospatial Information compiled by the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management)23

Geospatial products and services are created by integrating a wide range of datasets from different sources. Currently, geospatial information is licenced from one party to another in a licence agreement, where the owner of the geospatial information (the Licensor) grants another party (the Licensee) rights to the geospatial information. This legal relationship is more complex than in a sale or purchase since both parties have ongoing legal rights and responsibilities. This complexity increases as geospatial products become more diverse, each with unique and conflicting licensing terms. Even “open” data is subject to licensing unless the owner is willing to give up their copyrights by placing the data in the public domain. The geospatial information license agreement therefore sets forth the rights the licensor is granting the licensee, as well as the risks allocated or shared between parties involved (such as quality of data, violation of local law or injury to third parties). Parties in these agreements need to also consider whether unique intellectual property issues should be addressed. In ideal situations, government agencies generate tremendous amounts of geospatial data which is mostly placed in the public domain as part of advocacy for “open data”. However, in an atmosphere of political instability, insecurity, and fragmented government institutions, these data do not exist, forcing NGOs, academic and civil society organizations to collect the geospatial information needed to implement or monitor individual projects. This further complicates the issue of integrating datasets owing to the heterogenous license agreements that accompany each dataset produced by individual organizations.

The advocacy for geospatial information to be made available under open data licenses is continuing to gain momentum. OpenStreetMap for instance, publishes its data under Open Database Licence (ODbL).24 The ODbL requires that “Derivative Databases” (a databases based upon the OSM database) must adopt a comparable open data licence (known as the “Share-alike Provision”). This Share-alike Provision makes it difficult for some commercial enterprises for instance to integrate their proprietary geospatial data with OSM since that would constitute a derivative database and as such would have to be licensed under ODbL. Alternatively, organizations that have their geospatial data in the public domain may find it difficult to integrate with OSM data for fear of creating a derived product licenced under ODbl, which is more restrictive than public domain. Similarly, it is a challenge sharing geospatial data produced under a Creative Commons license25 with OSM as OSM requires its contributors to grant the right to sublicense while many Creative Commons licenses do not grant the licensee the right to sublicense geospatial data.

While creating open data is a worthy aim being considered by governments, humanitarian organizations and NGOs worldwide, using geospatial data requires an understanding of licensing agreements which contain a variety of conditions that could impact the products and services being created by integrating geospatial data. Owing to the continuous influx of stakeholders in the geospatial community, all critical terms in geospatial data need to be clearly defined to avoid confusion or uncertainty between parties in a license agreement. Additionally, geospatial standards and metadata are likely to become more critical as non-traditional actors (who have their own standards and data formats) become providers and consumers of geospatial data. The geospatial community needs to incorporate metadata and standards into geospatial data license agreements as these will become primary legal protection in the event of a dispute. Alternatively, considerable restrictions could be imposed on the use of data by attributing roles to users. Conditions of access to data will subsequently be defined by these roles (for some, it would be free without restriction whereas for others it is not).26 A summary of recommended open data licenses can be found in Appendix 8.