“One of the characteristics of open data — as stipulated in the definition provided in Article 1, paragraph 1, letter l-ter) of Legislative Decree 7 March 2005, no. 82 — is that it must be 'available under the terms of a license or a regulatory provision that allows its use by anyone, including for commercial purposes, in disaggregated format.' [...] The application of a license, in addition to correctly identifying and 'defining' open data, serves as a functional tool to ensure certainty regarding the effective reusability of the data; certainty that constitutes an essential prerequisite for valuing information." – Guidelines containing technical rules for opening data and reusing public sector information, AGID, pp. 85-86.
The Guidelines from which the introductory passage was taken, in addition to recommending "always apply a license to published datasets, in ways that make it easily identifiable and understandable," with reference to Legislative Decree 36-2006, highlight advice and requirements, among which are:
- Restricting the conditions of the license applied to the data to attribution only, with the exception of rules concerning the reuse of personal data;
- Limiting the use of licenses with additional conditions beyond mere attribution to strictly necessary cases only;
- Limiting the use of the "share-alike" (SA) clause only to cases where it is justifiably necessary or after verifying the impossibility of releasing with a CC BY 4.0 license, for example, due to the otherwise unmanageable use of a source already released with an SA license;
- Not using, by data holders available for reuse:
Licenses that do not permit derivative works or commercial use;
Proprietary licenses.
Therefore, in the context of open data, licenses that do not allow the reuse and production of derived data and/or their use for commercial purposes are not considered valid, as is the case for licenses with NonCommercial (NC) and No Derivatives (ND) restrictions.
Open data, however, can have a license that imposes data ownership and allows copying, distributing, modifying, processing, and re-sharing data, even for commercial purposes, with the sole restriction of acknowledging the research's origin.
Among the existing licenses with these characteristics are:
- CC-BY belonging to the international Creative Commons licenses;
- The IODL (Italian Open Data License) in its 2.0 version;
- The Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) for data/databases.
Furthermore, open data can have a license that, in addition to requiring acknowledgment of the research's origin, obliges elaborated data to be re-shared in an open format, allowing their reuse even for commercial purposes, provided that the derived products are shared under the same license attributed to the original data.
Among the existing licenses with these characteristics are:
- CC-BY-SA belonging to the international Creative Commons licenses;
- The IODL (Italian Open Data License) in its 1.0 version;
- The Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).
To learn more:
Creative Commons Website - Italy
Creative Commons Website
Italian Open Data License Website
Open Data Commons Website
AGID. Guidelines containing technical rules for opening data and reusing public sector information. Art. 12 Legislative Decree no. 36/2006 and subsequent amendments.