Legal foundation

When working with digitized material, external page copyright and/or related property rights must always be carefully checked and observed.

The term Open Data refers to data that is publicly available and can be freely used, reused, and distributed without restriction. There is no single license that is considered part of the definition of Open Data. However, there are several open licenses that are commonly used for Open Data.

Data made available under a CC0 license or with the Public Domain Mark can be reused without restriction. To support the idea of open and FAIR data, the ETH Library also uses Creative Commons licenses wherever possible. These can be reused under certain conditions.

A special case is bibliographic metadata. As a rule, these are not works in the sense of the Swiss Federal Copyright Act. Works are defined there as follows: "Works are literary and artistic intellectual creations of an individual character, regardless of their value or purpose." It can therefore be assumed that bibliographic metadata are not protected by copyright. However, exceptions are possible. It should be noted that this only applies to the metadata - i.e. the descriptions of the digitized material and not the digitized material itself.

For Open Data at the ETH Library, the ETH Zurich disclaimer applies.