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I'm working on a few wrappers for some web APIs which are under the Apache-2.0 license; for testing I have responses that I've gotten from the real API on the resource classpath to test against. I serve them over an embedded mock web server to verify the data is parsed correctly and any utility methods work.

The saved data is just the raw JSON responses from requests to the respective APIs which include Cleverbot, UrbanDictionary, and various games.

I'm unsure if it's necessary, but I'd like to avoid having references to any content that can be linked backed to an owner or copyright holder in the repository to avoid also redistributing it under those terms.

Is it a good idea to somehow mark these files as excluded from the license?

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    What license do you want to distribute these outputs under?
    – MadHatter ♦
    Jun 11 '20 at 5:32
  • Very sorry for the late response, I was giving this some thought but forgot about it. I think it only makes sense to make them FOSS too and that my question is invalid. They're needed to be copied, modified, and redistributed just like the rest. The solution to my concern probably isn't excluding them but rather for requests where I'm concerned about this I should use mock responses with my own data instead of using the raw response from the API to avoid third-party content in the repository.
    – Seth Falco
    Jun 18 '20 at 5:53
  • Fair enough! Do you want to write up your own answer then accept it (when permitted), or would you rather delete the question?
    – MadHatter ♦
    Jun 18 '20 at 5:55
  • Unfortunately the solution doesn't exactly answer the question (XY Problem?), but I'll write up an answer for it later today anyway, if that's alright. Thank you for the help. Your question helped me realize in my case I should probably try make the test responses FOSS friendly, not licensed differently or excluded.
    – Seth Falco
    Jun 18 '20 at 6:06
  • Don't forget it's your question; if you're answering it, and nobody else has, you're free to edit the question so it lines up better with the answer. And I'm glad the community helped you to think your way to a position you're happy with!
    – MadHatter ♦
    Jun 18 '20 at 6:43
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In this particular scenario, I've decided this is not a good idea.

The reason for this is that I still need the terms of the open-source license to ensure the work can be downloaded, modified, and redistributed under FOSS terms. I can't just want to distribute it the same way and then say
"... but it's not under those terms though!".

The real solution is that the files that I have this concern with, I should be making FOSS friendly by removing parts that might fall under other copyrights.

For example, API responses with arbitrary data should be perfectly safe, however if certain responses contain information that can be linked to an owner or copyright holder then I should replace some values of the response in post.

For example, with the YouTube Data API, I could replace a video description with Lorem Ipsum.

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