Government announces details of new license for re-use of public data

The government has released the details of a new Creative Commons-based licence for the publication of public data to enable government data to be re-used commercially and non-commercially by the public.

The announcement of the new license coincides with the launch of the government's new data portal, data.gov.uk, which has created a single access point to over 2,500 central government datasets that have been made available for free re-use. It is expected that the new licence will be introduced by the end of May 2010.

The new model licence will replace the existing Click-Use Licence for public information. The terms and conditions of the new licence are based on those on the international Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence, which means that publicly available databases can be-used and adapted for most purposes. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.

The government is also encouraging other parts of the public sector, including local government, to make much more of its information available to the public. At the beginning of January, the Mayor of London announced plans to create an 'online data warehouse' for disseminating data generated by  the Greater London Authority.

Further information on the development of the new license is available here.