Open Ownership Register licence terms

Warning – essential reading

The information in the Register comes from many sources: national governments and international bodies (such as EITI), but also users directly submitting data on OpenOwnership. This means that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information in the Register, nor that any use or uses of the data which you may make are lawful under intellectual property law or otherwise. Therefore you use the information at your own risk and should conduct your own investigation.

    General

  1. This page describes the terms under which we make available the material found under the domain register.openownership.org (the “Register”). This includes access via the world wide web, API or otherwise. These supplement (overriding in the rare cases of conflict) the general terms for use of our website.
  2. You are not permitted to use Register if you do not obey these terms.

    3. Our intellectual property rights

  3. Even though we do not claim to own intellectual property rights in the individual entries in the Register, in jurisdictions where they apply, we own intellectual property rights, including a database right, in the Register as a whole. We make the Register available under the Open Database License, which imposes various “share alike” and attribution conditions on you.

    Use of any data must be accompanied by a hyperlink reading "from OpenOwnership" and linking to either the Register homepage or the page of the specific person/company record cited. The attribution must be large and clear and in all cases no smaller than 70% of the largest font relating to the information or 7px, whichever is the larger. Citing us in a report or article you write directly supports our work and helps us make the case for transparency.

    If you are interested using the Register without these restrictions, please contact register@openownership.org.

    4. Other intellectual property rights

  4. Where we have obtained that information from an official source, intellectual property in the source considered as a database, and in its contents, may belong to the official body from which we have obtained it, or to other person or persons. In many cases, it may be impractical or impossible for us to discover what rights might exist and who might own them.
  5. In consequence, we make no promises that any particular way in which you may wish to use data obtained from the Register is lawful, whether in our jurisdiction or yours. You should always check the conditions imposed by the official source from which we have obtained the data. We will make sure that a link to each source is provided so that you may do this.
  6. Where data has been supplied to us through our site or an API by someone who has signed up to our contributor terms (see under “Contributions”) below, we permit you to use any such data under the same licence as the rest of our website. To the extent that the supplier of the data may have any database right in the data, we license that to you under the Open Database License.

    7. Denmark

  7. You are forbidden from using any data obtained from the Danish Central Business Register for unsolicited marketing. If you permit others to use any such data, you must impose a similar set of conditions on their use of the data as we have imposed on you. Further detail available from the Danish Central Business Register.

    8. Contributions

  8. If you contribute information to the Register (including any corrections to existing information in the Register), you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide and royalty-free licence, with a right to sublicense, over all intellectual property in anything you contribute.
  9. When you submit information to the Register, you may submit information:
    1. about yourself as a beneficial owner;
    2. about a company of which you are a director (or equivalently titled officer); or
    3. where you have a mandate to submit it from someone who falls into either of the previous two categories in respect of the information you wish to contribute.

    10. Information Quality

  10. As we explained at the start of this page, we make no promises that the information available through the Register is accurate. It may be misleading on inaccurate in many ways, and in particular:
    1. The original source, over which we have no control, may contain errors.
    2. We may have applied data cleaning techniques to the information which have introduced further errors. In some situations, we may even be aware that such errors are a possibility, but we may not have found the resources to correct them.
    3. We may have made good faith efforts to correct what we thought were errors – for instance as a result of a complaint from a data subject or member of the public – and in so doing introduced further errors unintentionally.
    4. We may have failed properly to understand the semantics of the data source from which we have obtained the data (in some cases they can be confusing or obscure) and made an error in mapping that semantics to the Register.
    5. The official source may have been updated, which may, in turn, be because of an error reported to it, and the new information may not yet have migrated into the Register.
  11. You should be aware that inaccuracies are possible and before relying on any information contained in the Register for anything of importance, you should conduct your own investigation – for example by cross-checking the official data source if that is where the information comes from.
  12. We welcome reports of any errors in the Register, but if you make such a report, it will be treated as a contribution (see above under “contributions”) and your report should make clear the basis on which you are making the report.

    13. Misuse

  13. Although we make the Register available generally free of charge, we reserve the right in our absolute discretion and at any time to prevent access to some or all of it, or to choke access to it, to any person or from any IP address. We may do this because we believe that misuse of the Register has taken or is about to take place, but we may have other reasons for doing so.
  14. The sorts of behaviour that may encourage us to take such steps include imposing excessive load on our servers; breaking any of the conditions of any licence under which information in the Register is made available; or using it in ways directly contrary to our expressed public purpose.

    15. Reporting abuse

  15. If you are aware of any misuses of the Register – for example, the use of Danish derived data for unsolicited marketing – please report any such misuse to register@openownership.org.