[od-discuss] a clause to achieve compatibility

Mon Feb 4 23:25:13 UTC 2013

Hello. I am a member of OKF Japan initiative and CC Japan.

I recently had a brief conversation with Daniel regarding license
compatibility, a subject matter of my increasing concern. As per
Daniel's suggestion, I am posting the idea to this list.

I think it is good if many of the national open data/
open govt licenses had a clause saying something like this:

- if you use this Work in combination of any other work
that is under a Creative Commons Attribution License,
this Work is licensed the same Creative Commons
Attribution License for that use.

"Creative Commons Attribution License" part could be
other licenses, such as ODbL, ODC-BY, CC-BY-SA,
of course.

This type of clause is better than having a statement
"this license is compatible with XYZ license" which
may be read either as a declaratory or descriptive
statement, and has rather unclear legal effects.

There are different ways to define compatibility, but
this kind - possibility for users to remix two works
under different  licenses and release the resulting
work under an open license - is a simple, user-friendly
way to understand it, I think.

I am not a lawyer, neither is Daniel, so we wondered
if expecting something like this is a sensible thing for
legal experts.

CC-BY-SA has similar but less user-friendly clause.
You can read technical description of how CC-BY-SA
works here:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Treatment_of_adaptations#License_obligations_of_downstream_users

Remixing is supported by CC-BY-SA but different parts of the resulting
work will remain under two or more different licenses when
the original licenses of those source-works are different.
As a consequence, a potential user of a remixed movie
based on three works under CC-BY-SA 2.0 Generic script,
CC-BY-SA 2.1 JP sounds, and CC-BY-SA 3.0 clips,
respectively, has to read all the three licenses and follow
all of them to some degree.

Best,

Tomo
----
Tomoaki Watanabe, Ph.D.
  Co-founding Member, OKF Japan Initiative
  Executive Director, CC Japan
  Sen. Research Fellow& Assoc. Proffesor, Center for
Global Communications (GLOCOM), Int'l U. of Japan
----