Licensing of digital commons including personal data

This document provides a review of the licensing options for digital data commons, including for the case that data commons include personal data.

The review starts with the analysis of the most common licensing procedures, free licenses and best tools that allow the releasing of artifacts avoiding licenses’ incompatibility and possible violations of third party’s rights. Then it recalls the necessity to distinguish the different kinds of data managed and processed through DECODE services, in order to identify the proper license for each of them.

The analysis continues focusing on digital commons made of personal data and on how they can be licensed. At the end, the document offers an initial set of smart rules to be adopted by the pilots or other services based on DECODE OS in order to strengthen users control on data commons, a table for evaluating the compatibility of free licenses to be adopted for DECODE artifacts, and a Data Commons Privacy Pledge, that is a pool of voluntary standard commitments for strengthening data privacy rights and digital commons values.