Evolving Ontario’s licensing framework for a digital world
As Chief Privacy Officer and Archivist of Ontario, thinking about how people can get at and use information is my stock and trade.
My division, Information, Privacy and Archives (IPA), is responsible for providing organization-wide leadership on recordkeeping, access and privacy. The access part of that mandate includes providing policy advice on licensing government information. Last month, we released guidance clarifying that ministries can apply open licences to government information in Ontario, including things like government publications, directives, policies, and other crown copyright materials.
I say “we,” but while IPA was responsible for the final product, we were only able to develop this solution by working collaboratively with teams from across the Ontario Public Service. Staff from Open Government, Corporate Policy, Publications Ontario and our legal services branches rolled up their sleeves to help make it easier for citizens to access and use government records and information.
Access and use are at the heart of the work that gets undertaken at IPA. You may know us by our other name — the Archives of Ontario. We’ve been in the business of helping people access and use government records since 1903. We have the historic plaque to prove it:
Licensing — the various permissions we give people to use intellectual property– is a huge part of this, and is even more significant in a digital context.
Our division’s been around long enough to see the transition from paper records accessed in person to digital records accessed online. We’ve seen how that shift fundamentally changes what access means to our users. Digital means that one record can be easily accessed and copied, and that those copies can be manipulated more easily, changed more radically, and repurposed more quickly than we could imagine in a paper context. In digital contexts, users can, and want to, find and manipulate information more easily, and with less direct intervention on our end. This cultural shift has made licensing considerations even more pertinent.
Licensing is about permissions, and there is a whole spectrum of permissions you can give to use intellectual property you own. Intellectual property is simply information and the rights which protect it — copyright is perhaps the most well-known form of intellectual property right. If you own intellectual property, you can choose how you let others use it, from refusing to let others use it at all, to charging others for the right to sell it for a profit.
Open Licences are a kind of licence intended to hit a sweet spot on that spectrum in the online world. They’re licences with broad permissions, designed to make access and use easier, more consistent, and more transparent. Applying open licences to government information can reduce barriers to access, make it easier for citizens to use and re-purpose information, and encourage innovation.
Making it possible to apply open licences to Ontario government information has encouraged innovation on our end, too. We were lucky to be able to approach this work horizontally — partnering with other information-centric areas like Open Government and Publications Ontario — and creatively. The team brought a number of different perspectives to the table, as librarians, lawyers, policy staff and operations experts were tasked with reconciling our slightly dated policy framework with the realities of the digital world. The solution that the team devised, an interpretation bulletin, paved the way clear to open licences in the OPS, and in doing so, creatively modernized the application of an existing policy instrument.
Now that we can apply an open licence, what’s next? We’ll keep working closely with our partners in Open Government and Publications Ontario as they work with other parts of government to understand how to apply open licenses to their own information. On our end, we’re going to keep giving thought to the best ways to position Ontario’s licensing framework for a digital world.
While we keep working, you can read more about the great work that’s being done in other places like the National Archives of the United Kingdom, or get in touch with my team if you’d like to chat more.
