Building a Product on Public Data: A Practitioner's Guide to Sourcing, Licence Terms, Derived Rights, and Attribution
By Casey Scott McKay ·
This guide is for counsel advising a business that builds a product from public data, and it starts from an observation about how such businesses actually fail. They rarely fail because someone sued them for copyright infringement; they fail because a feed stopped, because a share-alike condition surfaced during diligence, because an accuracy claim became a liability, or because privacy regulation caught up with the aggregation. The guide is organised around preventing those four. It covers the provenance register, verifying government work status, reading portal terms as contracts, recording the acquisition route, screening for share-alike and non-commercial conditions, the derived rights position, attribution propagation, refresh and accuracy obligations, personal data, and source dependency.
IP and Technology > General IP | Guide | Published 26 September 2023 - Updated 28 March 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us
Summary. This guide is for counsel advising a business that builds a product from public data, and it starts from how such businesses actually fail. They rarely fail because someone sued them for copyright infringement; they fail because a feed stopped, because a share-alike condition surfaced during diligence, because an accuracy claim became a liability, or because privacy regulation caught up with the aggregation. It covers the provenance register, verifying government work status, reading portal terms as contracts, recording the acquisition route, screening for share-alike conditions, the derived rights position, attribution propagation, refresh and accuracy obligations, personal data, and source dependency.
Keywords: public data product · provenance register · acquisition route · government work status · portal terms of use · share-alike screening · licence compatibility · derived rights · attribution propagation · refresh and accuracy policy · personal data exemptions · geospatial licensing · court records · training data provenance · source dependency
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