Creative Commons Licensing as a future economic indicator?

Mary Gianoli

(04/03/2010 2:39 pm)

Thanks, for this post and the other informative postings about the EC’s PSI Group’s preliminary work on measuring economic activity related to PSI re-use. The explanations about reviews of the research methodologies used in previous studies are useful.

In considering your question about: how robust the selected indicators might be in the future given the rate of new developments, changes and advances in technology, has the EC Working Group on economic indicators considered doing a review of which European governments (at national or local levels) are already using or considering using Creative Commons Licensing (CCL) for accessing PSI?

If such a review were undertaken at six monthly intervals it would be a way of assessing what progress has been made on this front? Perhaps, this isn’t the only methodology option for understanding how CCL is affecting economic activity related to PSI re-use, but CCL as an economic indicator perhaps needs consideration.

If more use is made of CCL in the future, then will it have an impact on using ‘the number of licences’ as an indicator? If so, should this indicator be expanded to also incorporate some measurement of CCL in PSI re-use?

The UK National Archives have published a report of the first phase of their study on copyright policies at the local authority level (see news: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/news/n...local_government_copyright_policies).

There are also news reports of some local authorities considering CCL when opening up their data, for example, Rennes passe à l’open source pour diffuser ses infos pratiques (http://fr.news.yahoo.com/12/20100...-open-source-pour-diff-549fc7d.html).

If only the number of licences is used as an indicator, and there is increasing use of CCL, the data collected might distort the picture. Or, in other words, taking into consideration the moves towards using CCL might be a consideration as an indicator.

It would be interesting to know more about this, for example: is it a consideration and what is the current thinking?