[od-discuss] Questions about attribution requirements in OS and English Heritage data

Tue Jul 23 20:26:05 UTC 2013

On 13-07-23 08:53 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Kent Mewhort <kent at openissues.ca> wrote:
>> Sure, let me try to clarify.  If an author places a work under an open
>> licence, this is effectively a licence "to the world".  The author grants
>> the rights to anyone who receives the work.  If someone else redistributes
>> that work, the downstream recipients are still receiving their licence from
>> the original author, not the redistributor.  The original licence applies to
>> everyone and there is no need to "sublicence".
>>
>> In fact, a lot of open licences such as Creative Commons explicitly prohibit
>> sublicensing.  This is to make it clear that you're not allowed to
>> redistibute the work under a different licence.  You can't add any terms to,
>> nor remove any terms from, the original licence.  Of course, if you make
>> modifications, you can attach additional terms onto your own modifications
>> (unless a copyleft clause requires you to place these under the same
>> licence).  Copyleft or not though, the original work is still under the
>> original licence.
> I've always thought this was a pointless restriction in the absence of copyleft.
>
>> Even when licences don't explicitly prohibit sublicensing, it's usually
>> implicit.  I'm not aware of any common open licences that allow
>> sublicencing.
> http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
> http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0
Heh, foot in my mouth on that particular comment. Still though, I find 
that such a general right to sublicense with no details, even as found 
in MIT and Apache, decreases clarity; as what exactly is this additional 
right that the licence purports to give you (as compared to CC-BY or 
CC-BY-SA, which prohibit sublicensing, for example)?  I suppose it 
allows you to tag-on additional obligations to redistributions of the 
original work, even where you've made no changes, but there's not many 
use cases for this and I wouldn't say it's exactly a good practice to 
pile on more obligations to the original either.

I believe licenses such as CC explicitly prohibit sublicensing to make 
it clear that you can't drop off obligations.  You can do so in the 
commercial context (for example, your sublicense certainly needn't 
require your own customers to also indemnify the original licensor, nor 
follow the same payment obligations).

Given the lack of clarity of the legal effect on what obligations you 
could possibly drop off in an open licence, I'd rather see the right to 
sublicense disappear from open licences, unless they're going to clarify 
with this right with either some details, or by stating another 
particular license which you can sublicense under.