[CivicAccess-discuss] MP Postal Code Lookups

[Cory Horner]

On 2010-02-25, at 11:02 AM, Jennifer Bell wrote:

> One suggestion: Could you make the service licensing more clear on the site that describes the API?

Good point.

This will get complicated fast, as each API call may have a different license depending on the data sources.  Limiting our scope to the MP postal code lookup, it also gets weird as there are 2 licenses to merge, and this is a derivative work (postal code is used to find a riding which is used to find attributes for the MP, and only the attributes for the MP are returned).

For the postal code data, I am constrained as follows:

"You may not make the Data publicly available in easily downloadable format (i.e. PKZip files or static HTML pages) on public network such as bulletin boards, online services, or the internet.  However, the Data may be used on public networks (i.e. the internet) if used within a 'Lookup Application' and a reasonable daily limit of queries per IP address is imposed."

For the riding boundaries:

"The Licensee shall ensure that the following copyright notice appears in an
appropriate and visible location in the Licensee's Product, where any of the Work 
is contained within the Product '© The federal Electoral Districts Boundaries (Representation Order 2003) and Polling Division
Boundaries (39th General Election), Elections Canada.  All rights reserved. Reproduced with the
permission of Elections Canada, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0M6 Canada (2007).'"

I'm happy to put such a note on my website, since I want to applaud their data sharing practices (and their work is technically "in" my site), but I don't think users of the API would be bound by this, as no elections canada "works" are included in the data they got (it was just used as an intermediary step).

The How'd They Vote license is effectively "do anything you want, but be aware of the original license of the source data".  I consider the MP basic attributes (name, riding, phone number, website, ...) to be public domain facts, so no problem there.

Taking these all together, I would think there shouldn't be a problem storing the result of a postal code lookup in your database, but you probably can't republish the data with the postal code attached.

Do you guys agree with this assessment? If so, how might we boil this down to a concise terms of use?

Thanks,
Cory.