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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

One really weird thing about ProPublica publishing this, is they seem to say "this data should be public as it's for public benefit" yet their terms for accessing the data are extremely restrictive:

https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms

  You can’t republish the raw data in its entirety, or otherwise distribute
  the data (in whole or in part) on a stand-alone basis.

So, no spreading the data around. :(

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This is a blanket terms of use for their data store. They want you to cite them. And they don't want it to be possible to launder the data by having a non-profit/non-commercial user re-upload, so that a for-profit user can then download.

This feels like a heavy hammer for that purpose, but it seems pretty straightforward to read between the lines on these terms.

How can this be enforceable? Aren't the records themselves public domain since they were produced by the government?

This could be part of the aforementioned lawsuit trying to prevent the records becoming public.

The data has obviously been filtered and wrangled (e.g. it includes only complaints to officers with at least one substantiated complaint). What's offered for download is a single CSV, it may have been derived from multiple tables, and several fields may have been cleaned/normalized to the point where the data is substantially different than the raw records.

I was under the impression that you couldn't copyright tables of data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Terms of Service and copyright are two different things. Maybe the data's not copyrightable, but they can make their website terms of service say "by using our website and downloading this data, you agree to..."

You would have to research the case law to see if courts will enforce this. Anyone can say anything they want.

You cannot copyright facts, but you can copyright arrangements of facts, as long as the arrangement has a modicum of creativity.

The litmus test for this is literally the telephone book. The White Pages cannot be copyrighted (the court case you linked). But, the Yellow Pages can be copyrighted. The White Pages are nothing more than an alphabetic listing of phone numbers, but the Yellow Pages groups phone numbers by business type. This involves some editorial discretion, which involves a bare minimum of thinking, and therefore qualifies as a creative work.

As a general data point (pun intended ;>), there is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

No idea if that's even applicable in this instance though, as this is "Terms on a website" (my wording) - which would probably be a contractual obligation.

As the article notes, it's not recognized in US, and there has been a court case about that.

"In its entirety" So delete the last line of the DB...

The "in whole or in part" piece kind of kills that. ;)

Perhaps, perhaps:

> ...on a stand-alone basis.

As I read it, you could publish half of the data with a blurb about how it's only half the data, and where it came from. So it's not stand-alone.

Then you do the same thing with the other half. And please, cross-link them.

It seems to me that "on a stand-alone basis" can be interpreted to mean "without context," which would mean that publishing with proper context of the data is acceptable.

Either way, they're a single point of failure for the complete data set.

To me, that sounds non-optimal for getting the data widely used. :(

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