I’ve been mapping Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. The parish GIS department publishes an open data portal with street, address, parcel, and city limit datasets, but it does not give an explicit license. I reached out for clarification on this but received no reply.
Given my understanding about the copyrightability of facts in the United States and the apparent intent of publishing these in “open, free and reusable formats,” I don’t think using these sets would be a risk, but I also know that OSM doesn’t want to risk litigation. Would it be fine to use these when mapping?
Louisiana has relatively unfriendly laws when it comes to the copyrightability of government works. Whether this matters depends on how you plan to use the data. You can definitely use it as a source to corroborate the names of a handful of streets, but wholesale copying might be a different story. Although individual raw facts are ineligible for copyright in the U.S., the dataset would enjoy some weak protection as a compilation. Ideally our sources would be more clearly free of IP restrictions.
Who did you reach out to, and what did you ask for? I’ve found that the best way to get a useful response is to introduce yourself as a volunteer for our project and ask, very simply, whether there are any restrictions on reusing the material. If they answer no, then you don’t need to get into the intricacies of database licenses or whatnot. If they want, we can reproduce the police jury’s disclaimer on our Contributors page as a courtesy.
I emailed gis@calcasieu.gov, which is given on their contact us page along with a contact list of individual employees. Do you think reaching out to one of the managers individually would be more likely to get a response? Maybe call the phone line?
This is the body of the email I sent. I modeled it after one that is somewhere on the wiki. Now that I see it again, perhaps it could’ve been a bit shorter.
I’m mapping Calcasieu Parish in OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative open project to create a global geodata set freely usable by anyone.
I want to know if the data at the Parish’s open data portal is compatible with the Open Database License under which OSM is covered (currently no license is given). If it is, then a written statement as simple as:
“Calcasieu Parish has no objections to geodata posted on its open data portal (Data) being incorporated into the OpenStreetMap project geodata database and release under a free and open license,”
which could be made public would be greatly appreciated.
If approved, some portion of the dataset may be imported manually/automatically or used as part of the review process for this area. Of particular interest are the Streets, Addresses, and City Limits datasets
It couldn’t hurt to try one of the other options if you’ve already given the main contact line a reasonable time to get back to you.
I’m sorry you stumbled upon the boilerplate on the wiki. It might be appropriate in some contexts, but if you’re dealing with an agency at any level of government in the U.S., anything mentioning licenses is probably just going to get forwarded to a legal department and go in circles before coming back with a no. If you try again, definitely just ask them the yes/no question about whether there are any restrictions.
@JuanElDemografo Did the parish ever give you an answer to this? I was about to reach out to them until I saw this post. I don’t want to ask them again if you have gotten somewhere with them already.
I’m pretty sure the data they have posted online is just digitized from public records or they are the source for it. I’d like to think they’d be okay with people using it for this purpose. I do know that previous versions of their aerial imagery were locked down behind license agreements (I assume the same is still true but can’t confirm) so using the imagery on Totaland or the Pictometry imagery is most likely a no-go (it’s licensed through Eagleview).
Nope, I got nothing from them. The last email I sent was to Mr. Hebert back in September after writing this post. Feel free to reach out; if enough of us do they’ll maybe eventually respond.
I agree that the intent is to let them be used freely without restriction, but without better confirmation I’ve just been using it to compare with street-level imagery for TIGER review and confirming the occasional POI address.