When the licence says open and the terms say no: reading an open licence to its edges

An open licence on a public body’s website is not a blanket permission. It is a grant with a defined scope, and the exceptions to that scope are frequently the exact material a reader came for.

The clearest illustration we found sits on one page: the copyright page of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Read to the end of it, three statements appear that pull in different directions, and all three are the authority’s own.

Three statements, one page

First, a broad open licence. NZQA states that “Except in the restricted circumstances set out below, NZQA materials on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 International Licence.” CC BY 4.0 is a genuinely permissive licence: it allows copying, distribution and adaptation, including for commercial purposes, provided the source is attributed. A reader who stops at this sentence has been told something true and has drawn the wrong conclusion.

Second, an exception that removes the qualification data. The restricted circumstances section names the New Zealand Qualifications and Credentials Framework and the Directory of Assessment and Skill Standards, and lists what those contain: qualification details, unit standards and achievement standards, assessment materials, consent and moderation requirements for standards, and NCEA and Scholarship examination material. For that material, NZQA states that it can be cited and used as reference material, but that “for uses of the material other than for citation or reference NZQA permission for the use must be obtained”.

The reason given is specific and reasonable: parts of that material were developed by third parties, so a further permission may be needed and the attribution may have to name them.

Note what the exception covers. It is not an administrative footnote. It is the qualification framework itself — the descriptions of qualifications and standards, which is the material anyone building a qualifications resource would want.

Third, a general requirement for commercial use. Further down the same page, under its own heading, NZQA states that any person or organisation proposing to use NZQA material for a commercial purpose must apply to NZQA for permission, and links to a page explaining how to apply.

That third statement carries no reference to the Creative Commons licence and no exception for material the licence covers. CC BY 4.0 permits commercial use by its own terms. The requirement to apply does not. On the page as published on 3 September 2026, the two are not reconciled.

Separately, NZQA’s robots.txt disallows /nzqf/search/*.html$ — the search pages of the qualifications framework — to every crawler.

What we are not saying

NZQA is entitled to reserve rights in its material, and it has explained why the framework material carries a further condition: third-party contributors. Publishing an open licence with exceptions is normal practice for public bodies, and the exceptions here are stated in plain language on the page where a reader would look for them.

The observation is narrower and is about reading, not about conduct: on this page, the headline grant and the qualifications data point in opposite directions, and the reader who stops at the headline will be wrong.

The same shape elsewhere

This is not a one-off. The pattern — open licence over the site, register or dataset treated differently — appears in more than one place.

TEQSA, the Australian higher education regulator, states that “With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms, and where otherwise noted, all material presented on this website is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.” Its robots.txt then disallows /national-register and /national-register* to all crawlers. The licence text contains the phrase “where otherwise noted”; whether that phrase is meant to reach the national register is not stated anywhere we could find. Two signals, one permissive and one restrictive, sitting on the same domain.

The contrast case matters just as much. The Office for Students states that “All content owned by the OfS is available for re-use under the terms of the Open Government Licence (OGL)” and that “If you re-use any of the content owned by the OfS you must acknowledge the source.” Its exceptions are the ordinary ones — logos, images, third-party content — and they do not reach into its published data. Its robots.txt blocks only the path used by its content management system.

So the answer is not that open licences from public bodies are meaningless. Sometimes they mean exactly what they say. The answer is that you cannot tell which kind you are looking at without reading past the headline.

What the headline actually grants

Part of the problem is that the two licences you will meet most often are genuinely permissive, so their names carry more reassurance than any particular page has earned.

Creative Commons Attribution, in its 4.0 and 3.0 forms, allows copying, redistribution and adaptation, including commercially, on condition that the source is credited. It is a real grant, and where it applies unqualified, it applies to commercial users too.

The Open Government Licence v3.0, used across the UK public sector, is similar in effect: copy, publish, adapt and exploit the information, including commercially, with attribution. It carries standing exclusions — personal data, logos and departmental identifiers, and third-party rights — that apply to every body using it.

Both are worth trusting when they are unqualified. The difficulty is that on a regulator’s site they usually are qualified, and the qualification is not part of the licence. It is added by the publishing body, in its own words, further down its own page. The licence name tells you what the grant would be. Only the page tells you how much of the site the grant reaches.

What no licence at all looks like

For contrast, it is worth recognising the more common situation, in which no grant is made anywhere.

The Malaysian Qualifications Agency’s site carries a footer asserting “Copyright Reserved” and a disclaimer page addressing the use of its name and logo. There is no licence, no re-use section and no application of a national open-data framework. Nothing on the page prohibits quoting it; nothing permits reproducing it either.

That is the ordinary default, and it is the position most bodies are in. Under copyright, rights are reserved unless granted. A body that has published no licence has not withheld one deliberately so much as simply never addressed the question — and the effect on you is the same. Silence leaves the default in place.

The reason to distinguish the two situations is that they fail differently. Where there is no licence, you know where you stand from the first glance. Where there is a licence with exceptions, the first glance actively misleads, and only reading to the end corrects it.

How to read an open licence properly

The routine below takes a few minutes and applies to any official page carrying an open-licence badge, in any country.

Read the whole page, not the first paragraph. The grant is usually near the top because it is the friendly part. Exceptions are placed below it. On the NZQA page, the material most readers would want is dealt with several screens down from the licence sentence.

Find the qualifier attached to the grant. Open licences on official sites are almost always introduced by a conditional clause — a phrase reserving restricted circumstances, or the familiar “where otherwise noted” and “unless otherwise stated”. Each such phrase means a list of exclusions exists somewhere. Locate the list; if you cannot find it, you have not finished reading.

Check whether the exception lands on the specific thing you want. This is the step people skip. Ask it concretely: is the dataset, register, table or document I intend to use named in the exclusions, or covered by a category that includes it? A licence that is open for policy documents and closed for register data is open and closed at the same time, and which one applies depends entirely on what you take.

Look for a second statement elsewhere on the same page or site. Commercial use, logos and trade marks, and bulk downloads are commonly handled in separate sections that do not cross-reference the licence. Two clauses on one page can conflict, and the conservative reading is the one to act on.

Check the robots.txt as a separate signal. It is at the root of the domain, it is plain text, and it takes seconds. Where a specific dataset path is disallowed while the rest of the site is open, that is a deliberate statement about that dataset, independent of whatever the copyright page says.

Note the version and date. Copyright pages are revised. Record the date you read it and quote the wording as it stood, so that a later change does not silently invalidate what you relied on.

Where two readings are available, take the narrow one. Silence is not permission. Under copyright, the default position is that rights are reserved, and a footer asserting copyright is a claim of rights rather than a grant of them. If a page can be read as allowing your use or as not allowing it, the safe course is to link to the source rather than reproduce it — or to use the application route the body has provided.

Why this matters beyond licensing

The habit generalises past copyright, and it is the same habit that qualification recognition demands.

Recognition rules are written the same way: a general statement that sounds like a yes, followed by conditions that decide the actual outcome. A body that says it recognises qualifications from a country will also say which awarding institutions, which years, which programme titles, and what further assessment applies. The sentence people quote is the first one. The sentence that decides their case is further down.

Read to the edges. The exception is where the answer lives.

degree.help summarises publicly available rules and explains what they mean. It does not assess qualifications, does not decide recognition, and does not replace a formal evaluation by a national recognition agency or a professional regulator. Nothing here is legal advice on copyright or licensing; where a re-use decision matters, the licence text and the body that published it are the authorities.