[OSM-legal-talk] Is CC-BY-SA is compatible with ODbL?

[Robert Whittaker (OSM)]

80n <80n80n at gmail.com> wrote:
> In order to submit CC-BY-SA under the contributor terms you need to give
> OSMF rights that you don't possess.
>
> CC-BY-SA does not grant you "a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
> perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by
> copyright" and so you can't pass that right on to OSMF.  Its as simple as
> that isn't it?

With the current CTs, yes I think it is that simple. And CC-By is
incompatible for the same reasons.

However, lets suppose (hope?) that the CT's are changed so they're no
longer a problem. The question still remains as to whether CC-By or
CC-By-SA are compatible with ODbL+DbCL.

>From my understanding of things, there are two potential problems:

First, DbCL requires the owner of the submitted content to give up and
copyright on individual data items. (It's that "worldwide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable copyright license
to do any act that is restricted by copyright" phrase again.) That's
certainly not a right that's granted by the CC licenses, though
depending on the jurisdiction and type of data you may be able to
argue that there was never any copyright on the individual data items
anyway. Some data providers may strongly contest that though.

Secondly, the provisions for produced works in ODbL mean that they can
be released with no direct attribution to the original source (only
the ODbL database they're produced from needs to be credited), nor any
specific restrictions / freedoms on attribution or licensing for
further downstream reuse. I believe that this ability is incompatible
with the requirements of the CC-By and CC-SA licenses, and hence under
ODbL 4.4(d) you would not be permitted to add CC-By or CC-SA licensed
data to an ODbL database that's going to be "publicly used".

(This second point has been acknowledged informally as a potential
issue by Ordnance Survey when I enquired about the possibility of
using OS OpenData under ODbL. They've yet to get back to me with a
formal response though.)

Unlike the CTs, I think there's a reasonable chance that data
providers currently using CC-By or CC-By-SA could be persuaded to
explicitly allow under ODbL+DbCL. But my current conclusion is that it
would not be permitted to import CC-By, CC-SA or CC-By-SA data into an
ODbL+DbCL database.

Given the use of CC licensed data in OSM at the moment, and the
possibility of amended CTs (at least for some large data providers) I
think these points need urgent clarification by OSMF's lawyers -- and
it would be good to ask the ODbL+DbCL authors at ODC for their views
too.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker