I wonder if this will affect Libraries' data license agreements ...

 From Government Computer News
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/43515-1.html?topic=geospatial

Standards group approves geospatial-rights model
Open Geospatial Consortium’s DRM reference model should help solve
liability issues


The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. has approved a specification for
modeling digital-rights agreements for geospatial data.

The Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model “defines the
framework for Web service mechanisms and rights languages to articulate,
manage and protect the rights of all participants in the geographic
information marketplace, including the owners of intellectual property
and the users who wish to use it,” according to OGC’s press release.

What the GeoDRM RM represents, said Carl Reed, OGC’s chief technology
officer, is an important step toward giving geospatial-data providers
the kinds of legal protections they need if they’re going to open up
their databases to end users. The establishing of clearly agreed-upon
and understood digital rights agreements, Reed told GCN, is important to
remove “the fear of litigation.”

Whose responsibility is it if a map program steers a driver down the
wrong road and they end up driving off an incomplete high overpass? And
whose responsibility is it if an ambulance doesn’t reach an injured
person because the destination address was misrepresented on a map?

“This whole issue of liability is lurking in the background,” said Reed.
And a related — and very tricky — issue is that of defining the
“quality” of data. “When you get a map on the screen, what is it useful
for?” asked Reed. “And how do you warn an end user not to use it for
certain things and make decisions that may end up being wrong and result
in injury?” Reed says OGC has a new working group looking into the issue.

With the approval of the GeoDRM RM, said Reed, the next step is to
actually create specific language for agreements. Once vendors and other
data providers have the protection of such agreements, he said, they are
likely to be more open about offering the data in ways that it can be
put to use.

OGC is a Massachusetts-based consortium of more than 335 companies,
government agencies, research organizations and universities
participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available
geospatial specifications.