CLIPol — open-licence information for the public.

Origins

CLIPol — the CIPPIC Licensing Information Project for Open Licences — began at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. The original project produced a comparison and compatibility tool for open licences, targeting open-data publishers, open-content producers, and the broader open-source community working at the intersection of copyright, database rights, and Crown Copyright in Canadian and international contexts.

The project was developed by Kim Mewhort (kmewhort) and is referenced from the Open Source Initiative's licensing-tools list, the Open Knowledge Foundation's working-group wiki, Creative Commons Canada's resources page, and the working materials of multiple Canadian and international open-data advocacy organisations.

Open source

The CLIPol comparison tool is open source. The repository is at github.com/kmewhort/clip and the project is licensed openly for reuse and adaptation. The repository covers the working comparison engine, the licence-data model, and the historical comparison data the original tool published.

What the catalogue covers

CLIPol's licence catalogue intentionally covers five categories that are most often combined in real open-data and open-content projects:

• The Creative Commons family — CC0, the attribution variants (BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-ND, BY-NC-SA), with explicit coverage of the version 4.0 changes that addressed database rights.
• The Open Data Commons family — PDDL, ODC-BY, and the Open Database Licence (ODbL), with particular attention to the database-rights and share-alike interactions that arise when combining databases.
• The open-government licences — OGL UK, OGL Canada, the GeoBase / Canada family of pre-2013 geospatial licences, the New Zealand and Australian frameworks, the French Licence Ouverte, and the Italian Open Data Licence.
• A small set of open-source code licences (MIT, Apache 2.0) for cross-domain comparison work — when a project produces both data and code under different licence regimes.
• Public-domain dedications — CC0 and PDDL — which sit at the most-permissive end of the open spectrum and have particular utility for high-volume data publishers wanting to avoid attribution-stack accumulation.

What CLIPol is not

CLIPol is a public-interest reference. It is not legal advice and it is not a substitute for the original licence texts. For a specific combination decision in a real project, particularly a project that will be redistributed at scale, the original licence texts (linked from each catalogue entry) are the authoritative source and a lawyer with subject-matter familiarity is the appropriate adviser.

Contact

Editorial corrections, additions to the catalogue, and other substantive feedback can be sent to the address on the contact page, or filed as an issue on the GitHub repository.