data.gov.uk terms are too vague

IMHO there are legal problems with the license terms stated on the data.gov.uk 'Terms and conditions' page. My opinions below are subject to the customary 'I am not a lawyer' disclaimer, but I've spent much time learning about copyright and database licensing so I feel quite familiar with this topic.

Firstly, the bullet-point list of conditions seem to have been mostly copy & pasted from the CC-BY 3.0 license summary page, instead of just applying the license itself. Maybe there were specific reasons for that, but it's created some issues.

The license summary page that the terms were copied from, says in the footer that the summary "is not a license", "it is a human-readable expression of some of its key terms", and "itself has no legal value".

Consequently, in the data.gov.uk terms, it is legally unclear what's really meant by, for example, the right to "adapt" information sourced from data.gov.uk, or the requirement not to "modify" the information.

If you read the terms under the "You must" section of the data.gov.uk 'Terms and conditions' page, the second statement, reads more or less as: "ensure that you do not ... modify ... the information." That sentence seems to have been copied out of context from the license text, restriction 4c., but missed out the end of the sentence. The unintentional consequence is that it would seem to prohibit just about any application, given that the word "modify" could be interpreted quite loosely (such as merely unzipping the database from zip file).

I think it would have been much better to simply apply the CC-BY 3.0 license instead of this copy & pasting of specific terms. If you then want to waive any specific restrictions of the license, you could easily refer to them by paragraphs number/letter.

At http://creativecommons.org/choose/ are clear instructions for applying their licenses. By the way, they seem to suggest using the CC-BY 2.0 UK license in preference to the CC-BY 3.0 license which is currently not available with UK-specific legal text.

Anyway, for my second point, I should mention that "Creative Commons does not recommend using Creative Commons licenses for informational databases..." (according to Creative Commons themselves). These licenses are meant for copyright in artistic works, or maybe items of data, but not the database rights that apply the collections as a whole (or in part). Unless data.gov.uk makes a separate waiver of database rights, no permission is granted to use (eg. within the applications that are already being sold or made publicly available) the databases provided here.

So I think the best solution to the first issue would be to apply a CC-BY license properly. But to resolve the second issue would require an additional waiver of database rights, or even the use of a different license to CC-BY, but I can't recommend a suitable one.

Better still, data.gov.uk could just public-domain everything (eg. with a CC0 waiver) and then all legal issues should simply go away. But that might be seen as radical.

Maybe data.gov.uk should speak to real lawyers about the issues I've mentioned, or maybe even to Creative Commons (who I think would recommend CC0). I fear that until this is resolved, there is a lot of uncertainty, particularly among prospective developers of commercial applications, who ought to worry about being sued. I know the intention of data.gov.uk was openness but I'd like to see it properly declared with all the required legal wording.

I welcome other people to add their own opinions of course.

Thanks.