Thanks, Gabriel.
Aisling and Colm, are you still interested in pursuing this? Jodi, are you interested too? I'm going to contact some people I know offline who may be interested in lending a hand also. Anybody else willing to lend a hand? Or any ideas out there for how we might approach this?
We might also contact the folks at Creative Commons Ireland (
http://www.ucc.ie/law/irishlaw/creativecommons/). They may have a sounder understanding of the legal issues involved and may be able to advise us. I see they have already ported a draft the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA to Irish law:
We might need a full port of a Wikipedia compatible CC license to Irish law before we can definitively ask the government to switch over to one. Is there anyone from Creative Commons Ireland already on this list?
I have done a little reading of the Merrion Street site and dug a little into the issues involved. From that, I see there is a relevant European Directive that requires member states to "ensure that practical arrangements are put in place that facilitate the search for documents available for re-use":
This has been transposed into Irish law under the Statutory Instrument (SI) European Communities (Re-Use of Public Sector Information) Regulations 2005 (SI 279 of 2005). There appears to have been a follow up Statutory Instrument in 2008:
(I haven't read these yet.)
All material on the Merrion Street website (beyond permission for linking, downloading and printing) "is subject to the terms of the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 (SI 279 of 2005)." Third-party material is excluded from that permission (what proportion of the site is third-party, I don't know).
Additionally, the copyright page says, "You may re-use the information on this website free of charge in any format." What the implications of that is, I don't know.
As part of the 2005 Statutory Instrument, it seems that a standard license (the "PSI license") was prepared for public material:
I don't know if this license is Wikipedia compatible. If it is, we may be onto a winner and can just lobby for this license to be used more widely. If it is not, then we may have a fight on our hands.
Given that Merrion Street recently used a CC-BY-NC-ND license, the PSI license may not be widely used. Also, as Colm noted, they have recently changed to "all rights reserved". I don't know what this means with respect to the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations (or if it even applies) or how widely used the PSI license is within the public service.
One tack we might take is to see what aspects of the current PSI license would need to change before it would be compatible with Wikipedia. If there are any copyright lawyers out there — or if we can convince the CC people to help us here — then we could go to the government with something solid. (This is assuming the current license is incompatible.)
Finally, under the appropriate regulations, it would seem that the Minister for Finance (don't ask me why) is the relevant minister for the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulation. A website dealing with information on the Re-use of Public Sector Information is here:
So, in summary, from my quick look four approaches pop out at me:
- Port a Wikipedia-compaitble CC licence to Irish law and convince the Merrion Street (or the Government) to use that.
- Identify what aspects of the current PSI license is incompatibe with respect to WIkipeida, convince the Government to change (or adopt it as a secondary license) it and implement it widely (including on Merrion Street).
- Lobby directly for Merrion Street to use a Wikipedia-compatible license (port or not) for some or all of it's material.
- Develop a relationship with Merrion Street and other agencies so that we can ask them for specific material (or sets of material), which they will release to us under a compatible license at their discretion.
No matter the approach, I think a copyright lawyer would be of great assistance to us.
Best,
Oliver
On 14 Jul 2011, at 23:28, Gabriel Beecham wrote:
I'm willing to lend a hand in this regard.
-Gabriel
On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Oliver Moran
<oliver.moran@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey guys,
Was away on holidays for a few weeks. Did anything more happen around this? Would be willing to put effort into campaigning (letter writing, phone calling, shoe leather, miscellaneous money, etc.) into this.
I think it would be a very important achievement and not entirely unrealistic.
Oliver
On 29 Jun 2011, at 00:18, Aisling Walsh wrote:
Hi Folks,
I have a contact who works in the Dept of Taoiseach.
She said to direct any queries about MerrionStreet.ie to
editor@merrionstreet.ie
If there's anything else I can do please let me know,
Thanks,
Aisling
On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Colm King
<cargoking@live.com> wrote:
Legwork? I'd be prepared to draft an email/do the research.
Colm
From:
abartov@wikimedia.orgDate: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:06:38 -0700
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia IE] MerrionStreet.ie
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Asaf Bartov
<abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 5:46 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10 June 2011 13:26, Colm King <
cargoking@live.com> wrote:
> Considering that other governments, such as the US and Polish governments,
> release their images for free, I was wondering if anybody else felt it was
> appropriate to lobby the website to release their images under a CC licence
> (suitable for Wiki) or into the public domain.
into something two-way compatible with CC-by - that is, they retain
copyright, and change the licence. Perhaps that UK work could be
repurposed for IE. I'm vague on the fine details ... anyone?
So... no?
Asaf
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation
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