Another comment from a discussion on Nodalities, this time about Creative Commons and databases:
Science Commons has a page with some explanations regarding Creative Commons and databases. It seems that two of the European versions of the Creative Commons licenses (Belgium and Netherlands) do mention the “database rights”. I’m not sure why this isn’t mentioned in all versions of the licenses, would be interesting to know if there is a good reason for this or if it’s just a historical accident. Have there been any discussions between the Creative Commons and the Open Data Commons people?
Ed note: I believe France includes them as well. The Science Commons FAQ is here.
Absolutely there has been conversation between the two. Long story short, the reason why some of the European CC licences include DB rights is because the legal leads on those teams included them. They are often considered separate rights, and so some teams didn’t licence them with the copyright. Also there is a question as to what to do with them — they operate differently than copyright and the question of how to license them was an issue. As CC was seen as first and foremost a copyright licence, DB rights were not the core discussion.
I believe that the position of CC going into the future will be for the EU/EEA jurisdictions to waive any database rights. It is an approach that I’m not entirely sure I agree with, but will have to see the language of the licences being developed. My concern is that I want to make sure that for people who mutliple licence data (think of the MySQL business model) that they don’t totally waive a set of rights that they may rely on in another context.
So for example, ACME has a database that they offer on a Share Alike (SA) basis using a CC licence with a waiver of database rights and also offer the same database on a non-SA basis. XCorp wants the database, but doesn’t want to make all their changes “Share Alike” (release their derivative databases under the same licensing terms). Essentially, XCorp wants to add a whole bunch of changes to the database but not make them available because they think they can make money this way. ACME offers them a commercial licence of the database. If ACME has waived their database rights, does this lessen ACME’s position in the commercial licence setting? Do they have a better or worse position without the database rights in trying to generate income of commercial licensing?
The Open Data Commons Database Licence preserves this multiple licensing model by licensing, rather than waiving, the database rights. In fact, it includes a notice to that effect in Section 3.2:
Note that this Database may be multiple-licensed, and so You may have the choice of using alternative licences for this Database.
Now this isn’t to say that it might not be appropriate to waive database rights in other settings, or even in the CC licences, provided that they aren’t used on databases. Some have argued that textbooks can meet the definition of a database and so attract database rights. In areas that we wouldn’t normally think of as “databases” it might be the best answer to waive any database rights. Part of the rationale of the ODCDL is to address some of the issues specific to databases, which are rather unique and in my opinion worthy of a separate licence.
