( No warranty - I didn't check the metadata or QA in any way )

Marine and land zones: the union of world country boundaries and EEZ's

This dataset combines the boundaries of the world countries and the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world. It was created by combining the ESRI world country database and the EEZ V11 dataset.

https://www.marineregions.org/downloads.php#unioneezcountry

Many thanks for your help... however these appear to be protected and not in the public domain....

They have a license, which is typical for any authoritative data, but not 'protected' ( http://www.vliz.be/en/data-policy ). In this case that license, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) is one of the least restrictive and most generous possible ( https://www.marineregions.org/disclaimer.php , and IMHO promotes good data IP and quality hygiene ( lineage, for example ), especially in the case of a global dataset which is under continual evolution ( Brexit, Greece/Turkey, etc. for example ).

The US Government totally open, public domain data license ( https://resources.data.gov/open-licenses/ ) is not all that common globally, and in the case of global collaborative datasets where each nation is the original source with their own policies, rarely applies. "... The default U.S. Public Domain status of U.S. Government Works is limited to the jurisdiction of the United States. ...."

Also, cursory examination of various US sources like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency shows their public facing datasets point back to this one. Perhaps there is an approximate legacy dataset out there that was produced by NOAA, CIA or some such that falls under the US Government public domain dataset, or if you are ambitious, you could roll your own ( https://www.gc.noaa.gov/gcil_maritime.html ) approximation.

Perhaps I don't understand why your end use would find the license terms onerous. There are situations where 'redistribution' might be problematic, like a class room or computer lab would restrict downloading or open access to the Internet for security reasons, but usually a short email to the providers will allow an exception in those cases ( Open Street Map is granted these permissions all the time for data imports from municipal, county, state/provincial, and national governments all over the world ). Or why attribution would be problematic.

Hi Michael

Many many thanks for this. It looks like you are 100% correct. The publisher (Francis & Taylor in the UK) is super paranoid about copyright issues. I'll see if this will work.

Thanks again,

Don

That is precisely why I was advocating - ambiguity around implicit 'no license given' is a hobgoblin, compared to the certainty of even a explicit very restrictive license, where usually on can communicate with someone and get a waiver if required. There is a wide variety of 'public' and 'open' licenses, and the myriad of interactions between them.

Another path is to send whatever dataset team an email identifying yourself, affiliation, your submission, the journal it is destined for, the citation you will give, etc. and sometimes they'll return a simple 'fine with us'.