Our guiding principles

1. Differentiation between commercial and non-commercial usage

We take commercial usage to have a wide meaning. For bodies or organisations that are primarily commercial, it includes:

• any direct or and indirect commercial purpose or advantage,
• re-sale of our information or advice based on it,
• charging for advertising space, or
• gaining goodwill with clients of customers by providing free or non-profit making services.

For bodies and organisations that are primarily non-commercial, such as a public authority, not for profit organisation or private individual, commercial will mean offering a product or service for direct monetary compensation - even if it is not profit making (e.g. the sale of a book or newsletter with a cover charge even if it does not cover all costs). However, the following are deemed non-commercial:

• charges permitted under Environmental Information Regulations (EIR), the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), the Data Protection Act (DPA) or other statutory requirements;
• by a public authority supplying data to another public body for the purpose of either one carrying out its public task (e.g a county council providing data to a district council);
• indirect monetary compensation (e.g advertising) that does not provide a profit.

2. Differentiation between internal and external usage

Internal usage means that the data or derived data does not leave the recipient body (i.e. legal entity) or person. However, we treat as internal usage passing of data to a contractor/sub-contractor if usage is limited to the purposes of that contract/sub-contract and all terms of the original licence are applied.

External usage of data or derived data includes passing on the whole data set, a part data set or a search extract.

3. No adverse impact on the Environment Agency

Any intended usage of information must not represent a risk of:

• being misleading to the end user;
• being detrimental to the Environment Agency's ability to achieve its objectives;
• detriment to the environment, including the risk of reduced future enhancement;
• being prejudicial to the effective management of data held by the Environment Agency.

4. All usage is attributed to the Environment Agency

All usage must be attributed to the Environment Agency, i.e. state or acknowledge us as the source and where appropriate or expressly specified by us, intellectual property owner of the data.