Talk:Open Government Licence

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British Railways Board / British Transport Commission[edit]

Clarification requested as to OGL applicability to documents produced by British Railway Board/ British Transport Commission. Sfan00 IMG 12:11, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Local Government publications[edit]

Clarification requested as to OGL applicability in relation to works of UK Local Government (i.e works produced under nominal crown copyright by District and County councils), as opposed to national (UK) and develoved regional government? Sfan00 IMG 12:11, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Supporting material for Legislation[edit]

Clarification requested: OGL applicability to materials provided in support of Legislation. The specific example I had mind was plans and sections provided in support of Orders made under the Transport and Works Act, or in support of full blown 'railways' bills in the UK Parliment ( for example Crossrail)...

Sfan00 IMG

Problems[edit]

If you are interested in perception of OGL issues on Wikimedia, have a look at my Commons talk page. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:16, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Philately[edit]

Does the OGL cover stamps? What is the legal status of British stamps? —Tom Morris (talk) 17:54, 4 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Owned by the Royal Mail and used commercially. Note that there are probably complications about the use of Royal marks here, so even "PD" items (over ?50 or something years old) might be not "open".
James F. (talk) 23:37, 28 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

government OGL contract, material usage[edit]

Hi,

I might be contracted soon on an OGL project. This would involve bringing material from wikibooks onto another platform, and all updates on this platform fed back into wikibooks. The only problem here is that the platform will be OGL. Is there a problem with:

OGL -> CC 3.0 SA

CC 3.0 SA -> OGL

Thanks --Pluke (talk) 10:06, 14 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

UK Birth/Death/Marriage certificates[edit]

Questions have been raised from time to time as to whether the OGL applies to British birth/death/marriage certificates. The answer seems to be a qualified yes, provided that all parties named on the certificate are deceased,[1] and that any living parties should have their names redacted before certificates are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. A detailed discussion may be found on this Commons page. Muzilon (talk) 11:35, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Military insignia[edit]

The statement that the OGL does not cover military insignia appears to be incorrect. See the discussion at c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Arctic Star medal.jpg, which has a link to an MOD page with an OGL release.[2] Several other OGL images of military insignia are available on the same site.[3][4]. Please correct or clarify the text. Thanks, Verbcatcher (talk) 09:38, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Scottish Government Flickr[edit]

Following a discussion on Commons with regards to images up for deletion, I contacted the Scottish Government to ask about the license used on their Flickr; this has now been updated to a wiki/OGL compatible license, with a few small exceptions. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (talk) 17:43, 20 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

NHS, ok or not?[edit]

--Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:46, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There's not really one answer as the NHS is not one thing. Check each service and see.
A lot of services which are NHS branded are produced by central government (the Department for Health and Social Care, usually). NHS.UK is listed as Crown Copyright, and the terms and conditions specifically note (at 3.3) that it is licensed under the current version of OGL (unless otherwise noted). The NHS England website has OGL 3.0 mentioned in the footer.
But the NHS is a vast array of different organisations—some public, some private, a mixture of the two—and most of the stuff they produce probably isn't Crown Copyright or covered by the OGL. NHS Inform, the Scottish equivalent of the NHS health information site, is very much not OGL. —Tom Morris (talk) 09:07, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No. 10 Downing Street[edit]

Does Open Government Licence (OGL) apply here for photographers that are employed by the government? The Creative Commons license changes often. I wondered why OGL is not used. Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 00:28, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The reason OGL is not used on Flickr is simple - Flickr does not offer it as an option to uploaders. It would be immensely useful if they did, as the UK gov could advise civil servants to just set it to OGL. Instead, they vaguely pick a CC license.
It keeps changing because there's not—as far as I'm aware—much training in government on this. Politicians change, civil servants change—and each time, they kinda just do what makes sense. The civil servants doing are primarily focussed on communications and public relations rather than copyright. —Tom Morris (talk) 08:55, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]