Talk:Open Government Licence

British Railways Board / British Transport Commission

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

Local Government publications

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)

Supporting material for Legislation

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

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)

Philately

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

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)

government OGL contract, material usage

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)

UK Birth/Death/Marriage certificates

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)

Military insignia

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)

Scottish Government Flickr

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)

NHS, ok or not?

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

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)

No. 10 Downing Street

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)

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)

Hello @Tom Morris, you wrote, "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." Two United Kingdom Flickr accounts change licenses from album to album on an almost weekly or monthly basis. The photo licenses alternate from full copyright to a Commons friendly Creative Commons license. The Flickr accounts are Number 10 (Downing Street) and the UK Government.

Apparently, UK Government employees can arbitrarily change licenses without any standards or process for making decisions. The National Archives has some educational webpages about OGL, but it does not seem to support arbitrary licensing. What are your thoughts on this? Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 01:49, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Reliability of the gov.uk copyright notice

I thought I'd try to add a few ([5] [6] [7]) of the gov.uk images because the copyright disclaimer below said that they were all licensed under the OGL (Open Government License), but I'm not sure that it's accurate. I've seen at least one stock photo up there (specifically, this one appears on stock websites), and several produced by a non-governmental organization. I'm pretty confident in the Gauld photo being valid, but the Bee Network one was taken by Transport For Greater Manchester, which is an arm of a local combined authority, and I haven't been able to figure out whether local government is covered by crown copyright, or whether voluntary associations like that are exempt. Does anyone know whether these images' copyrights are valid? Mrfoogles (talk) 15:45, 11 July 2024 (UTC)