Paul Keller from CC Netherlands on a tremendously informative new report:

As part of the activities of Creative Commons Netherlands the Institute for information Law has been undertaking research into an number of issues connected to the use of the Creative Commons Licenses. In 2007 much of this research has focused on the use of Creative Commons licenses for the distribution of public sector information by government bodies. This research has been carried out by Mireille van Eechoud (whom a number of you will have met at last years iSummit where she gave a preliminary presentation on this topic) and Brenda van der Wal.

This research has resulted in a Report titled Creative commons licensing for public sector information: Opportunities and pitfalls (pdf).

While the report focusses on the situation in the Netherlands it should be of intrest to Creative Commons projects in other countries as well. Primarily because the Dutch regulatory framework for public sector information is derived from the European PSI directive and should thus be fairly similar to the regulatory framework in the rest of the EU countries.

This report is well worth reading because it makes a very well structured argument (by comparing th elicense characteristics of the individual CC licenses to the objectives of both the Public Sector Information legislation and the Freedom of Information legislation in the Netherlands) for the use of the least restrictive licenses (CC-BY) and the Public Domain dedication (the report was written before the CC0 announcement) for public sector information. Given this the report underlines the need for adopting CC0 (at least the CC0 assert component) to the specificities (database rights, moral rights) of the European context.

All the best from Amsterdam,
Paul Keller

Creative commons licensing for public sector information: Opportunities and pitfalls, M.M.M. van Eechoud & B. van der Wal, Institute for Information Law, 2007: http://www.ivir.nl/publications/eechoud/CC_PublicSectorInformation_report_v3.pdf