API for open data with licensing info

If you’re looking for an API that provides open data along with licensing information, here are some solid options depending on what kind of data you need:

General open data / metadata APIs

• data.gov API
  US government open data portal with dataset metadata, including licenses where available.
  https://api.data.gov/

• CKAN API
  Many open data portals use CKAN, and its API exposes dataset metadata and license fields.
  https://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/api/

• Open Data Portal APIs
  Many cities, countries, and organizations use platforms like Socrata or CKAN and include license metadata per dataset.

Dataset and licensing lookup APIs

• Open Knowledge Foundation / Open Data Commons
  Useful for understanding license types and open data definitions.
  https://opendatacommons.org/

• Zenodo API
  Research data repository; records often include license metadata.
  https://developers.zenodo.org/

• Figshare API
  Research datasets with license info in metadata.
  https://docs.figshare.com/

For web-scale open data / knowledge

• Wikidata API
  Structured open knowledge, with CC0 licensing.
  https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php

• OpenStreetMap APIs
  Open geodata with ODbL licensing.
  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API

Licensing metadata in general

If you need an API specifically for license identification/metadata, check:

• SPDX License List API/data
  Standard identifiers for software/content licenses.
  https://spdx.org/licenses/

• Creative Commons license metadata
  Useful for CC-licensed datasets and content.
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

If you want a ready-made source of open datasets with licenses

Good starting points:

• Google Dataset Search — not a direct API, but helps discover datasets
• Kaggle datasets — licensing varies, check carefully
• AWS Open Data Registry — curated open datasets with usage terms
  https://registry.opendata.aws/

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a list of APIs by category (government, research, geospatial, etc.), or
2. a simple code example for fetching datasets and reading their license fields.