{"id":"OpenSupremeCourtLicence","title":"Open Supreme Court Licence","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-supreme-court-licence/version/1/open-supreme-court-licence-version-1.0.pdf","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The legal text was listed as unavailable before the review because it is published only as a PDF. It was fetched and converted for this review, so the record could be checked against the text after all. The licence is the Open Government Licence pattern with four extra conditions specific to court information. Applied: the licence-notice duty, the modified-works permission and the extra conditions as clause text.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"SPDX has no entry for this licence, so no identifier was invented. cc:legalcode and dct:source point at the PDF of version 1.0 at the National Archives and both resolve; the PDF is what was read for this review.","action":"none"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"The asset collection is dalicc:CreativeWork, dcmitype:Dataset and dcmitype:Software. The family-rule baseline flags the software type on the National Archives records as suspect; the text settles it in favour of keeping it: the licence defines \"Information\" as \"information protected by copyright or by database right (for example, literary and artistic works, content, data and source code)\", the same definition as OGL 3.0, so source code is expressly in scope.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The permissions follow the freedoms list: copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; and exploit it commercially and non-commercially. odrl:grantUse, dalicc:chargeDistributionFee and dalicc:chargeLicenseFee all rest on the commercial exploitation freedom and on the absence of any onward-licensing restriction. dalicc:noWarrantyNotice rests on the no-warranty section.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"dalicc:ModifiedWorks, distributing a modified version and making it available to the public, was missing although the licence permits adapting the Information and publishing, distributing and transmitting it in the same list, and the sibling record NCGL-UK-2.0 carries the permission on the identical wording. Added.","action":"applied","change":"odrl:permission [ a odrl:Permission ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:ModifiedWorks ] ;"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The licence requires two things when the information is used and the record modelled only one. Section \"You must (where you do any of the above)\": \"acknowledge the source of the Information by including the following attribution statement and, where possible, provide a link to this licence; Contains Supreme Court information licensed under the Open Supreme Court Licence v1.0.\" cc:Attribution was attached to cc:DerivativeWorks and odrl:distribute; cc:Notice was missing everywhere, although the attribution statement is itself a licence notice and the licence asks for a link to itself. Added next to cc:Attribution in both permissions, which is how the sibling record NCGL-UK-2.0 models the same sentence.","action":"applied","change":"odrl:duty [ a odrl:Duty ;\n        odrl:action cc:Notice ] ;   # added to the cc:DerivativeWorks and odrl:distribute permissions"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"cc:ShareAlike is modelled as an odrl:Prohibition. Nothing in the text forbids the licensee from placing an adaptation under a share-alike licence; the opposite is true, the licence states that its terms are compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 and with the Open Data Commons Attribution License. In ODRL a prohibition says the licensee must not do the act, so this statement asserts something the licence does not say, and it changes every compatibility answer against a share-alike licence. The family-rule baseline raises the same point for permissive software licences under rule 5b. Proposed for removal, together with the two sibling records that carry the identical block.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"remove:\n    odrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n            odrl:action cc:ShareAlike ]"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:addStatement is modelled as an odrl:Prohibition, which the vocabulary reads as: the licensee must pass the licence on unchanged and may not attach additional terms or notices. The licence says the opposite in its permission list, the information may be combined with other information or included in the licensee's own product or application, and it imposes no pass-through condition at all. Proposed for removal.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"remove:\n    odrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n            odrl:action dalicc:addStatement ]"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The licence carries four conditions that no deontic term can express and the record carried none of them: the non-endorsement rule, the duty not to mislead or misrepresent the information or its source, the duty to have regard to the dignity of the Court and to its function as a working body and not to jeopardise the proper administration of justice, and the duty not to breach the Data Protection Act 1998 or the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. Quoted verbatim into dalicc:additionalClauses so that they are at least visible in the record.","action":"applied","change":"dalicc:additionalClauses \"\"\"You must (where you copy, publish, distribute, transmit, adapt or exploit the Information): ... do not present the Information in a way that does not have regard to the dignity of the Court ...\"\"\" ;"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer holds both paragraphs of the No warranty section, quoted verbatim.","action":"none"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:perpetual match the grant, \"a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence\". The licence adds \"This licence is governed by the laws of England and Wales\", which the model has no field for.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"The conditions now held as clause text are the gap: a duty not to misrepresent the source, a duty of respect towards an institution and a data-protection compliance duty have no terms. Proposed terms: dalicc:noMisrepresentation, dalicc:respectInstitutionalDignity, dalicc:dataProtectionCompliance. The exemptions list and the automatic end of the rights on breach share the gaps recorded for OGL 3.0.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check reports no conflict, before and after the corrections.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The record is the Supreme Court edition of the Open Government Licence: the freedoms list, the no-warranty section and the definitions are word for word those of OGL 3.0, with the attribution statement and the four court-specific conditions changed. Modelling it identically to OGL 3.0 is therefore right, and the additional clauses are the only place where the records should differ.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"major","field":"record","description":"Standard-license addition of 2026-09-15, decision 9: the record was corrected against its new siblings and versioned. The review's finding on family consistency, applied to the third record of the Open Government Licence family: the unsupported cc:ShareAlike and dalicc:addStatement prohibitions are removed and the database right the licence covers is stated.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Government licenses (United Kingdom, Canada)","port_of":"UkOpenGovernmentLicenseForPublicSectorInformation","variant_kind":"edition","notes":"The review group input listed this record as text-unavailable, pdf-not-fetched. The PDF at the cc:legalcode URL was retrieved and read for this review, so the verdict is corrected rather than text-unavailable. Nothing in this review is legal advice."}