[od-discuss] Quick note on what it means to be "compatible" [was Re: OD conformant proposal: Open Government Licence v2.0 ]

Mon Jul 8 20:05:42 UTC 2013

On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com> wrote:
>>> - re "This means that when the Information is adapted and licensed
>>> under either of those licences, you automatically satisfy the
>>> conditions of the OGL when you comply with the other licence." - Does
>>> this license allow adaptation under another license? I see no
>>> indication of that elsewhere in the license, and it would not be the
>>> default situation under Berne, which is potentially quite confusing.
>>
>> ...that's what it sounds like to me. It could be stated even more
>> clearly, but an improvement over 1.0.
>
> Let me be explicit about what the problem here, as an educational
> point for those on the list who might draft or be asked to consult in
> the drafting of a license.
>
> As a matter of basic copyright law, you can't simply "change the
> license" on someone else's work. So it's best practice to define
> compatibility in one of two ways:
>
> 1. The two licenses have permissions/obligations that match up, so
> someone who complies with the more restrictive one (in this case,
> probably CC SA) can be certain of having complied with the more
> permissive one.
>
> 2. The more permissive license explicitly permits compliance with its
> requirements by complying with the more restrictive license.

To be explicit about why I said "could be stated even more clearly,
but an improvement over 1.0" in terms of the two points above...

> This license does neither, so it is confusing what it means to make an
> adaptation under another license - do you still have to comply with
> OGL? do you have permission to comply only with CC? something else?

I read v1 and v2 as attempting both, and v2 coming closer on both.

On matching up so that OGL UK 1.0 matches up as a donor to CC-BY, it
fairly plainly fails due to the terms that were removed in 2.0.

But it says is is "aligned to be interoperable" which is severely
lacking as an explicit permission, especially in light of failing to
actually be aligned, but it seems better than nothing.

Does OGL UK 2.0 actually fail to match up? My naive reading says that
is probably does match up: one will comply with OGL UK 2.0 if they
comply with CC-BY.

"These terms are compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution
License 4.0 and the Open Data Commons Attribution License, both of
which license copyright and database rights. This means that when the
Information is adapted and licensed under either of those licences,
you automatically satisfy the conditions of the OGL when you comply
with the other licence." reads more as an explanation than an explicit
permission, but surely one would argue that the permission is
implicit, and it sure is better than a not really true "aligned to be
interoperable" in 1.0.

> Again, I don't think this impacts OD compliance - it's just a matter
> of good drafting/avoiding problems down the road.

This gave me an idea for beefing up license submission questions,
which I just did at http://opendefinition.org/licenses/process/

Separately, I wonder if we should state anything about compatibility
of various licenses at http://opendefinition.org/licenses/ ?

Of course we can't provide certain answers, but right now someone who
isn't already a copyright specialist merely looking for an Open
license has no hope of even being aware of the issue.

Mike