[OSM-legal-talk] Are Produced Works anti-share alike?

80n 80n80n at gmail.com
Fri Mar 6 16:11:19 GMT 2009


I may have got this all wrong but it seems to me that Produced Works are
potentially compatible with most licenses, but are not compatible with most
share alike licenses.  I hope this isn't right and that someone can explain
the flaws in my reasoning.

I can create a Produced Work and publish it under MyWTF license [1].  If I'm
the author of the MyWFT license then I can put whatever clauses I like in it
providing I admit the ODbL reverse engineering clause and provide the
appropriate attribution.

However if I try to publish a Produced Work under a share alike licence like
CC-BY-SA then I am bound to the inevitable clause that will prevent me from
attaching any *additional* constraints to the license.  In the case of
CC-BY-SA this would be clause 4a which says "You may not offer or impose any
terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License..."  So I can't
add the extra reverse engineering clause that ODbL requires.

Since every share alike license, almost by definition, will have a clause
like this there seems to be no way that I can publish a Produced Work under
any share-alike license.

So, I can publish the Produced Work using any license I can dream up, no
matter how draconian, unless it contains a share-alike clause.

Are ODbL Produced Works really anti-share alike or is there some subtlety
that I have missed?

80n

[1] The MyWTF license:
1) Hands off, its all mine.
2) Any data created from this work that constitutes a substantial part of
the data contained in the original database is govered by the Open Database
Licence (ODbL).
3) This pretty picture contains information from the MyODbL database, which
is made available here under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
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