[OSM-legal-talk] PD declaration non binding?

[Anthony]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 5:53 AM, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:
> Frederik Ramm <frederik at ...> writes:
>
>>By the way, the database right exists - in certain jurisdictions like
>>the EU - even if it is not asserted. That means, OSMF is likely to hold
>>database rights over the database even today. But CC-BY-SA says nothing
>>about granting somebody use of the database.
>
> That's not quite the whole story; it does grant you a 'license', not merely
> a 'copyright license', to do the things listed in section 3.  If you are
> granted 'a license to reproduce the Work', for example, it's hard to argue
> that this does not cover making a copy of the database.  The text of CC-BY-SA
> does not limit the rights granted; it says that the licence lasts for the
> duration of copyright (so perhaps in 70 years there would be a problem, if
> somehow the database right lasted even longer) but does not say that only
> rights reserved by copyright law are being granted.

Unfortunately, CC-BY-SA 2.0 is flawed in this manner.  It grants you a
"license to exercise the rights in the Work" and defines the Work as
"the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this
License".  So if it's not copyrightable, it's not part of the Work,
and there's no license granted.

But this is fixed in CC-BY-SA 3.0.  And any derivative of a CC-BY-SA
2.0 work can be used under CC-BY-SA 3.0.