Proposing a licence for data
As contributions to the Talis Platform continue to grow, and an ever-increasing body of those interested in consuming Platform services come forward, it is important that we agree a licence with the flexibility and permissiveness to allow the use and reuse that we all want to see, whilst protecting the reasonable rights of those sharing their data in the first place. Believing that existing licence models do not adequately address the particular issues associated with contributing and consuming data, we are proposing a new Licence and would welcome your thoughts on it and ways in which it might be applied.
Licenses such as those from Creative Commons are used for this site and elsewhere within Talis, but don't really work for data contributions. GNU's General Public License works for software but it, too, would appear to fall short of meeting this community's data needs, especially in the light of legal protections such as those enshrined in the European notion of database rights.
We have drafted the Talis Community Licence with the specific intention that it provide adequate protections to those contributing data whilst also lowering unnecessary barriers to reuse of those data via the Platform by third parties. We are engaging with interested experts such as those from Creative Commons, openbusiness.cc, and the team behind a previous study into the applicability of Creative Commons to the UK public sector. We are also continuing to explore alternative licensing models, in case an existing licence that we have overlooked might meet these needs.
We welcome contributions and comment from all interested parties, especially those interested in using the licence to protect their contributions, those interested in using the licence to reuse data contributed by others, and those interested in using a licence such as this in contexts beyond the data currently available via the Platform.
GFDL
I believe the license you're looking for is the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
A good example of it's effectiveness in this type of application is that it is the license for Wikipedia.
That no license is "perfect" is illustrated in the Wikipedia article on GFDL.
Copyright vs. Database Right
Thanks for the reference. We have looked closely at GFDL and also the Creative Commons and would recommend use of any of those licences for copyrightable material such as documents. However, the Talis Community Licence is designed to protect uncopyrightable data representing facts. We plan to use a different right called database right to ensure that contributed data remains available to everyone.
GFDL does the job
I've reread your draft and strongly recommend you go with GFDL. I don't believe it offers the protection you think it does. And even if it works in the EU, it is unlikely to be useful elsewhere. An unenforceable license can lead directly to loss of the protection you sought.
Each of the activities that could establish database right are explicitly covered by GFDL: 4 - Modified Version, 5 - Combining, 6 - Collection. Those actions are permitted as long as the result is distributed under GFDL.
GFDL also addresses the issue of format of the data and prohibits conversion to a proprietary form unless the original is also made available. That is very important protection.
The proliferation of licenses has become an impediment to freedom to share and reuse of innovation. If works under your license cannot be combined with other works (and it is not obvious that they can be), then their usefullness is greatly diminished.
Please consult with the experts at www.fsf.org, www.opensource.org, and www.eff.org.
GFDL Doesn't Apply To Data
As mentioned before, we encourage people to us the GNU Free Documentation License or a Creative Commons license for any copyrightable work. The Talis Community License does not apply to copyrightable works so cannot be used for creative works such as prose, books, reviews or web pages.
Similarly you can only apply the GFLD to a work that falls under copyright law which exludes data such as lists of ISBNs. From section 1 of the license:
For data sets there is no copyright holder and so this license cannot be used.
The following FAQ from the Creative Commons site may be helpful as might be this page from the UK government site on database right.