Political

Government moves to relax copyright on public information

Look for examples of sensible government attitude towards copyright and the Pentagon may not strike you as an obvious starting point. But for years the US military has had a very enlightened attitude towards its official photographs: the photos are paid for by the public so the public should be able to use them for free. The British military has also moved towards much more sensible policies on such copyright matters in recent years.

Aside from such piecemeal advances, there has been a debate going on about the general application of “Crown Copyright” and what, or shouldn’t, be allowed to be done with information and assets such as photographs which the government puts into the public domain.

As Simon Dickson has covered, a very welcome step forward has just been taken with the new Open Government License:

It states in remarkably straightforward terms that ‘you are encouraged (!) to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence … freely and flexibly’. It has been defined to be legally ‘interoperable’ with the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, sharing a certain amount of its language – and even bears a mild visual resemblance to it, which is a smart move in itself.

As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t legally move the goalposts very much, I don’t think: but so much of this is in the presentation, and the culture change that it hopes to deliver. ‘Crown copyright’ sounds a lot more scary and protective than it really ever is/was. Even just the name ‘open government licence’ changes the whole tone.

 

On its launch Liberal Democrat Minister Lord McNally, Minister for The National Archives and Public Sector Information, said, “The National Archives isn’t simply a repository of our nation’s history, its task is to bring information to life, make it accessible and enable its re-use. This innovative licence gives everyone the opportunity to create products and services which benefit society.”

A licence is only as good as its take-up. There is a fair degree of central government momentum behind the Open Government Licence now, though I am sure that there are many other parts of the public sector which readers of The Voice have some influence in who could also make good use of the license too.

To take one very simple example: if you are a council, why not push for your council website to adopt it? It saves the time and effort in coming up with your own unique terms and conditions (don’t get me started on how many lawyer hours have been spent drawing up dozens and dozens of different website licenses for council websites…). It also avoid the risk of, er…, interesting decisions such as Hyndburn Council’s flirtation with banning photocopying of its website pages.

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