As more people and organizations are realizing the importance and benefits of publishing their data under an 'open' license, people are looking for the best license to apply.
Creative Commons CC has provided licenses that have facilitated great changes in the way that people publish their writing and artwork.
I know that there is some controversy over the use of CC licenses for spatial data, what are the technical concerns?
There is no problem with CC in general except when people use the optional share alike licence eg. OSM. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
It is quite common to want to mix copyright data that you can use but have no right to apply the cc licence to. So in not allowing derivatives that are copyright but with attribution, share alike renders such data incompatible. Some people have used layers in mashups to try to get round this but it is very shaky ground legally. Due to the number of people involved it is not usually possible to go back to them and negotiate a different licence for a particular use and in the end it means that companies won't touch it.
The aim is to force people into sharing their own work but in real life people get datasets from a variety of sources and the end result is that it simply reduces the number of people getting involved.
Another possible problem is datarot when creative commons data is released as no derivatives allowed.
This means that:
Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
This becomes problematic when errors are discovered in the dataset, or it needs updating in any way. If the copyright holder is not contactable, or a disinclined/too busy to maintain a dataset, it becomes less and less useful over time.
The problem is that in some jurisdictions (in particular the EU) copyright is applied differently for databases than for coherent single works of creation. Therefore, it was necessary for i.e. openstreetmap to work on a new licence that would cover these different ways how copyright law is applied in a way that the ideas of creative commons are also valid for information put in the form of a database.
not a direct answer but I think using an Open Data Commons license would be more appropriate than CC for sharing data
https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/
They have everything from a GPL type license to a BSD type license
I would be concerned about correctness, and authority.
The Creative Commons licenses make a lot of sense for spatial data that have key "creative" components - an index of delicious restaurants, or some other subjective topic. The attributes in such a dataset bring more value than the specific location, and a restaurant woudn't require within-a-meter accuracy.
However, for a dataset of gas pipelines, I want that to be as correct as possible! Granted, defining "who may use this" does not deliver a guarantee of correctness, but the nature of an open license makes it harder to place a value on the data.
Consider a published dataset of pipelines, licensed with the Creative Commons license. Someone later makes an update to that dataset to reflect what they feel is the true location of a certain pipe in the ground, perhaps due to construction or erosion or some other event. Now there is a disparity. Is this a technical concern, or a subjective / interpretive concern?
Update: A quick Google search exposed this document:
SPATIAL DATA LICENSE AGREEMENT
(I use this as an example)
Under Section V, Use Restrictions and Other Prohibited Activities:
The Licensee is familiar and understands the provisions of the National Map Accuracy Standards and assumes the responsibility and liability for the use of this data at other than the compilation scale (scale at which the digital data was intended to be output in hard copy format).
So, this license does not assume responsibility for the accuracy, but it does transfer responsibility to the licensee clearly. The Creative Commons license assume that the copyright holder has a 'creation', not a 'reference', which is the distinction I'm trying to make. I imagine one could add a clause to your Creative Commons license about accuracy.
I feel that Open Source software is a bad analogy for Spatial Data under a Creative Commons license. Open Source allows the freedom of any user to inspect the insides and validate it for their own satisfaction. Open data does too! Except... I don't want to have to validate it. Validating the position of something is not the same as validating the correctness of some lines of code; if I have to valid something's position on the Earth, why bother using someone else's?
