ISWC2009 Tutorial on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web http://www.opendatacommons.org/events/iswc-2009-legal-social-sharing-data-web/
We believe that dedicating data to the public domain is the best way to ensure that data is universally reusable and remixable. When data is public domain it means that it can be reused automatically without needing to check terms and conditions or track the source of every statement to provide attribution. These kinds of things act as friction to reuse, wasting energy that could be better spent creating inspiring things.
Today's announcement by the Open Knowledge Foundation of the release of version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) will create resentment in both professions- information technologists need to understand some of its complications, and lawyers will need to understand some technological limits of the license. In this post, I will try to articulate what some of the hard bits are.