Commenting here by request…
Disclaimer: IANAL. But I’ve spent waaaay too many hours dealing with US and international copyright and related issues, and can therefore confidently assert that you need a lawyer that specialises in international copyright before nailing down anything here. Trying to apply common sense and logic to copyright issues will get you in trouble every time. The alternative is finding som pragmatic approach that completely sidesteps the throny legal stuff.
TLDR: one field for our own copyright, suitably defined, and a purely informational field to document (neutrally) what third parties assert but only to help reusers make their own determinaton.
So (long version)…
The one thing we control is the copyright on what we have ourselves produced (technically also other IP-related rights such as patents, trademarks, etc., but we can get away with ignoring that for the purposes of this discussion). So what ought to be specified and displayed in a prominent structured form is our copyright assertion and licensing terms (CC BY-SA). A copyright license presupposes that there exists a copyright to begin with, which is not a given for an archetype, but with a permissive license like CC BY-SA we can get away with kicking that can down the road a bit. But we should display this with phrasing to the effect of: “To the extent any independent copyright arises in the archetype, it is licensed under CC BY-SA”). We should also be clear on which version of CC BY-SA we mean (3.0? 4.0?) and whether we mean later versions to apply automatically (at the reuser’s discretion).
Other people’s copyright? Now you’re in the quagmire.
The most obvious issue is that under US copyright law the parts of a score (or whatever) that an archetype implements have a, at best, questionable claim to copyright protection to begin with. Mere information is not protected, only actual creative expression is eligible for copyright protection, so the archetype bits might not have a copyright to begin with (and thus no basis for enforcing a specific set of licensing terms). Even text copied directly and verbatim from the source may not be eligible and thus may not be subject to the licensing terms (unless you enter into an implied contract to abide by them, despite no copyright existing to begin with).
Another issue is that for a joint work, one copyright holder cannot speak for the other copyright holders (specifically when it comes to granting permissions to third parties like us), absent a specific contract between them (that we are not party to and cannot know whether exiosts). So whatever special permissions or deals we make will have to be negotiated, and documented, with each of the copyright holders individually.
And then we get to the issue of which copyright. (Almost) everybody is a signatory to the Berne copyright treaty, but that treaty is not self-executing: each country must implement terms compatible with it in their own legal framework. There are rules for determining what the country of origin is for any given creative work, and then the copyright is determined by that country’s laws (e.g. in the US the term of protection used to be 95 years after publication, where a lot of the rest of the world protected works for 70 years after the death of the author). Internationally, Berne requires each signatory to implement laws that respect that original copyright, but each country implements this differently and the terms interact in unpredictable ways with other parts of their copyright laws. For example, there is great variability in what the criteria are for being eligible for copyright to begin with, and whether you need to be eligible for copyright in country A for its copyright laws to grant protection to a copyright from country B. In the US you do not get protection for a foreign work that would have been ineligible for copyright protection if it was a US work. In the UK the situation is the opposite (or I think it was, but it’s been a while since I checked, I could misrecall).
There are three parties to consider (us, a third party copyright owner, and a reusers of the archetype), and thus potentially three sets of copyright laws to consider (in addition to the international treaty-based rules) for any given reuse of an archetype (which is what the license in the archetype is trying to regulate.
Confused yet?
Now we can start trying to handle other IP rights that may exist, such as patents and trademarks. These are completely different legal frameworks (there’s no such thing as “IP law”; the term is a gross oversimplification) with at least as many complicated interactions and concerns as copyright does. And then add to that some other communities refer to as “non-copyright restrictions” (by which they mean restrictions that are not from any of the usual “IP” issues). An easy example here is pictures of legal tender (bills, coins). These are variously protected by copyright in different jurisdictions, but are quite often illegal to reproduce irrespective of copyright in order to deter fraud and forgery. In some jurisdictions it is absolutely possible that an archetype, or the upstream thing the archetype tries to implement, would be covered by special rules that restrict or permit dissemination based on e.g. being medical information, necessary for healthcare purposes, etc.
And what if two or more parties both assert copyright in whatever upstream thing it is we’re trying to implement?
So… Dealing with all this complexity for an unbounded number of possible usage scenarios is entirely impossible. Which suggests we should… not do that.
What is achievable is to somewhere document “known third-party rights and restrictions”. And in that field to document, for example, that “University X, University Y, and Health Syztem Z assert copyright to the Flurble Score, and request that enqueries about licensing be sent to licensing@example.com prior to use in a concrete implementation / prior to commercial exploitation / etc.”.
And that phrasing should always be such that it attributes the assertion to the party actually making that assertion (so that it is not us that is making that assertion), and should always be described as an assertion and not as fact (because the copyright, or whatever, may not actually exist in the first place). By doing that we are only making information available so that reusers can do their own due dilligence, instead of making it seem like we have made a legal determination that we cannot and should not even attempt to do.
Apologies for adding to the confusion, but the point is: the confusion is inherently so great that the only sustainable approach is to completely sidestep the issue, without abdicating the responsibility we have to our reusers and without stepping on the those of the upstream providers whose cooperation we need.
Cheers,
Terje
