[od-discuss] a clause to achieve compatibility

Tue Feb 5 04:46:00 UTC 2013

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Tomoaki Watanabe
<tomoaki.watanabe at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Making works released under this OGL-hypothetical effectively
multi-licensed under CC-BY and whatever else (with caveat of with
respect to use with works under these licenses), right?

I guess this would be a step further than Kent Mewhort suggested in
http://www.creativecommons.ca/en/oglc-consultation --

"Although the OGL-C draft takes the step of including a right to
sublicense, its broad stroke does not set out any details and the
legal implications remain uncertain. For example, the law is clear
that a sublicense clause allows a user to re-license her or his rights
under a different licence; however, does the user need to re-propagate
the letter of each obligation? To clear up this confusion, we suggest
that the final licence should grant an explicit right to sublicense
under a Creative Commons Attribution licence."

Which I was intending to comment on eventually, but it is related, so
I will now.

I'm 110% for more compatibility among licenses, but this strikes me as
a little odd (major caveat: IANAL). Unless the grant goes further, and
says that only the CC-BY license needs to be complied with (maybe as
Tomo suggests), I'm not sure how explicit right to sublicense under
CC-BY clears up described confusion more than just explicit right
sublicense.

Let's say a hypothetical OGL-C, same as the proposal but with a "You
are free to...sub-Licence under CC-BY" clause in addition to "You are
free to...sub-Licence"; is it really then more clear that a downstream
user has only to comply with CC-BY, and can ignore any problematic
clauses of OGL-C?

But the real reason it strikes me as odd is that
non-copyleft/sharealike licenses have never before had explicit
compatibility clauses with named other licenses, have they? The reason
the OGL-UK statement about "aligned to be interoperable" with CC-BY
and ODC-BY is odd is not because it isn't an explicit compatibility
statement, but because it doesn't really seem to be well aligned.

Multi-licensing would be more unambiguous, I guess, but a concern I'd
have for either is setting expectation for permissive licenses that
explicit compatibility of some sort is necessary, otherwise you might
not want to combine works under different permissive licenses.
Currently that kind of expectation is limited to copyleft/sharealike
licenses, where it is obviously necessary. But it is also the #1
drawback of copyleft. I'd hate to have a desire for better
interoperability among permissive licenses to lead to more fear and
uncertainty about the same. That would only be good for lawyers. :)

My instinct rather to push governments and other license creators and
stewards to whittle down the problematic conditions of their
permissive licenses and allow sublicensing, such that interoperability
is a non-issue.

But my instinct/concern/analysis may be woefully wrong. Please tell me.

Mike