Data Services: Ownership of Data/Copyright

This guide provides information on managing data and obtaining secondary data for research.

Intellectual Property Resources

Copyright & Ethical Use of Data

The following video was prepared by Nancy Sims, Copyright Librarian at the University of Minnesota. It provides a nice overview of issues of copyright and intellectual property with respect to data sets.

Licenses for Data

Since copyright does not protect data, you can use a license, such as Creative Commons. Creative Commons Zero (CC0) puts the work into the public domain and is a "unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty free license to use the work for any purpose." This does not, however, mean someone else using the data sets should not cite them appropriately.