Licence

Take it. You don't have to credit us, ask us, or tell us.

The short version

Everything we derive — the assembled datasets, the classifications, the geocoding, the verification flags — is released under CC0 1.0, which places it in the public domain. Use it commercially, republish it, build a product on it, train a model on it. No attribution required.

Why no attribution

Most of what's here is public record that we collected rather than created. Facts about who owns a parcel or where an aquifer sits aren't ours to license, and asserting rights over them would be dishonest.

Attribution requirements also make data harder to use. Combine forty sources and a dozen attribution clauses becomes an obligation to track forever — so people quietly drop the datasets that impose it. We would rather be used.

If you do want to credit us, geopen.io is enough. Every file we serve carries its source, licence and retrieval date inside the download, so it can explain itself long after it leaves here.

What CC0 does not cover

We can only license what we made. Source material keeps its own terms, and some of it is more restrictive than we are. Satellite imagery from ESRI's Wayback archive, for one, is free for non-commercial use only.

Each dataset page names its source. If you are doing something commercial and the underlying data matters, check the source before relying on it. Our licence covers our work, not theirs.

Per-dataset terms

A dataset can carry its own licence where a source requires it, or where the work is genuinely authored rather than gathered. Where that applies, the dataset page and the download both say so. Everything else is CC0.

The code

The application is MIT licensed and lives at github.com/bob-dinger/geopen.

None of this is legal advice, and we are not lawyers. If your use is high-stakes, read the CC0 legal text and check the source yourself.