Data Portability Licenses

Discussion

Typology

"Which leads onto the question of what form such a license might take.

Many of the options are already visible in copyright and software licenses, though I don't believe (m)any are directly suitable for use with data. The difficulties arrive with data derived from the original data - along the lines of software extension and modification, but twistier (e.g. attention profiles which might only contain derived data, but couldn't exist without the original).

Anyhow, possible examples would be:

1. Open License - anyone can use my data (with/without attribution)

2. Reciprocal Open License- anyone can use my data, but whatever they use it with must also be exposed under this license

3. Trust License - the person to whom I license this data may use it as they please

4. Silo license - the person to whom I license this data may use it as they please within the local system

1. is likely to be impractical in the context of social networking sites without fine granularity of data access - e.g. I'm happy for my name and homepage to be associated together in public, but would rather my email and geographic address are restricted. Long term I believe we will need this.

2. is ideal for Open Data, in fact this is essentially what the new Open Data Commons license looks like (Talis). But the copyleft nature of the license probably wouldn't appeal to many social networking services who see their data garden as business value.

3. seems naive, but I can't think of a better way of approaching things

4. would in effect be a formalisation of the current Facebook position" (http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/01/data_licenses_for_social_netwo.php)