{"id":"CreativeCommonsAttributionSharealike30UnitedStatesofAmerica","title":"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States of America","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The record models the BY-SA element set of the Creative Commons 3.0 port for United States and the deontic model is correct: the ShareAlike element carries a cc:ShareAlike duty, the attribution and notice duties hang on the acts that make the work public, and every permission follows from the grant section of the port. The legal text was read in English (United States), and the permissions, prohibitions and duties were checked against its grant and restriction sections and against the 4.0 International parent CC-BY-SA-4.0. Corrections applied: dct:source. What remains are proposals that touch the whole Creative Commons family rather than this record, chiefly the express prohibition of sublicensing.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"dct:source","description":"The record carried cc:legalcode but no dct:source. The legal code page of the port states the canonical URL of the licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/, and the six 4.0 International parents carry exactly that pair, legal code plus deed. Added.","action":"applied","change":"dct:source <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/> ;"},{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"The SPDX licence list defines no identifier for this port. The id that the legal code URL implies, CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, is not on the list, so none was invented. Only four records of this review group can take an SPDX identifier: CC-BY-3.0-AU, CC-BY-3.0-AT, CC-BY-3.0-US and CC-BY-SA-3.0-AT.","action":"none"},{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"dct:title","description":"The record is titled \"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States of America\" while Creative Commons and SPDX both name this licence \"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States\". The id and the published IRI carry the longer form, so the title was left alone; renaming it is a presentation decision for the association.","action":"none"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:target","description":"The record targets dalicc:CreativeWork alone, while the 4.0 International parent CC-BY-SA-4.0 targets dalicc:CreativeWork and dcmitype:Dataset. This port has no database rights clause, so the case rests only on the media neutrality of the grant. Aligning the ports with the parents is one library wide decision covering every Creative Commons port, so it is left as a proposal.","action":"proposed","change":"odrl:target [ a odrl:AssetCollection ;\n        dct:type dalicc:CreativeWork,\n            dcmitype:Dataset ] ;"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Every modelled permission is supported by the grant. Clause 3: \"Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below\". The grant covers reproduce the Work, incorporate it into one or more Collective Works and reproduce it as incorporated, create and reproduce Derivative Works with a clear identification of the changes, distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated, and do the same for Derivative Works. The record models this as odrl:reproduce, odrl:distribute, odrl:display, odrl:present, odrl:modify, odrl:derive, cc:DerivativeWorks and dalicc:ModifiedWorks.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:permission","description":"cc:CommercialUse is permitted and dalicc:chargeDistributionFee is permitted, which the grant supports: the licence places no limit on the purpose of the use, and the royalty free character of the grant concerns the licence fee, not a fee charged by the licensee for providing the work.","action":"none"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The licence forbids sublicensing and the record does not say so. Clause 4(a): \"You may not sublicense the Work.\" The vocabulary already has dalicc:sublicense, but no record in the library uses it and its skos:note says so, and the same sentence stands in every Creative Commons 2.0 and 3.0 record, so adding it to this review group alone would split the compatibility behaviour of one family. Proposed as one library wide correction, together with an update of the vocabulary note.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"odrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:sublicense ] ;"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:ChangeLicense is prohibited, which the licence supports: the licensee may offer the work only under the terms of this licence and may not offer or impose terms that alter or restrict it. dalicc:promote is prohibited, which rests on the reservation of all rights not expressly granted and on the trademark paragraph of the Creative Commons notice around the licence, not on a clause of the licence body.","action":"none"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The attribution and notice duties are present and supported. Clause 4(d) requires all copyright notices to be kept intact and, reasonable to the medium, the name of the Original Author or the \"Attribution Parties\" designated by the Original Author or Licensor, the title of the Work, the Uniform Resource Identifier the Licensor specifies, and, for a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work, for example \"French translation of the Work by Original Author\". The duties hang on odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive, which matches the licence, since they are triggered by making the work public rather than by private use. The cc:ShareAlike duty is carried at the level of the odrl:Set, as in the parent CC-BY-SA-4.0.","action":"none"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The share-alike clause of the 3.0 ports is wider than a flat prohibition of relicensing: clause 4(b): a Derivative Work may be distributed or publicly performed only under this License, a later version with the same License Elements, or the unported Creative Commons license or a Creative Commons license for another jurisdiction with the same License Elements (\"the Applicable License\"). The record expresses it as a cc:ShareAlike duty plus a dalicc:ChangeLicense prohibition, which cannot say that a later version of the same licence, the Unported licence or another port with the same elements is an acceptable outgoing licence. The 4.0 International parent has the same limitation, and the consistency check would report a conflict if dalicc:ChangeLicense were permitted next to cc:ShareAlike, so the present modelling is the only one the checker allows.","action":"none"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer and dalicc:LiabilityLimitation are quoted verbatim from the English (United States) text of this port and not from the English Unported version, and they match the disclaimer section and the limitation of liability section of the legal code. Each field holds its own clause, with no overlap between the two.","action":"none"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The record has no dalicc:additionalClauses, so the clauses the ODRL policy cannot carry, the reservation of unnamed rights, the downstream offer to recipients, the severability, waiver and entire agreement paragraphs and the termination rule, are not visible in the record at all. The whole Creative Commons family is modelled this way.","action":"none"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"cc:jurisdiction is bpicounty:UnitedStates, which matches the country of the legal code URL, and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual, which matches a grant for the duration of copyright. On the governing law: the United States port has no choice of law clause. Clause 8 (Miscellaneous) carries only the downstream offer, severability, waiver and entire agreement paragraphs. Note that the jurisdiction field records the legal home of the port, not a territorial limit on the grant: the grant itself is worldwide.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The licence forbids technological protection measures and the vocabulary has no term for it. Clause 4(a): \"When You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work, You may not impose any technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.\" Proposed term: dalicc:applyTechnicalProtectionMeasures, an odrl:Action to be used as an odrl:Prohibition. Not modelled, because bending an existing term would be worse than the gap.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"The automatic termination of the licence on breach, and the survival of the definitions, the disclaimer, the limitation of liability and the miscellaneous sections, have no vocabulary term. Proposed term: dalicc:terminationOnBreach. The downstream offer, under which every recipient of the work or of an adaptation receives a licence directly from the licensor on the same terms, has none either. Proposed term: dalicc:downstreamOffer.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"Moral rights: The United States port has no moral rights clause at all. The Unported 3.0 text carries one, and every other port in this review group carries one; the United States port replaces that paragraph with the musical composition royalty paragraphs, which fits a jurisdiction that recognises moral rights only in the narrow terms of 17 USC 106A. Nothing has to be modelled, and nothing can be.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"The royalty collection arrangement is not expressible. Clause 3 waives, for musical compositions and sound recordings, the exclusive right to collect performance royalties under blanket licences (naming ASCAP, BMI and SESAC), mechanical rights and statutory royalties under 17 USC 115 (naming the Harry Fox Agency) and webcasting royalties under 17 USC 114 (naming SoundExchange). Proposed term: dalicc:royaltyCollectionReserved, with a value saying whether the claim is reserved or waived and for which kind of use. This matters to a user of the model, because a licence that reads as royalty free can still leave a collecting society claim standing.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check with the 41 axioms of licensedata/dependencygraph/dg_default.ttl reports no conflict, before and after the corrections, and the pre-review baseline listed none for this record either.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The United States port is the closest of the six to the Unported 3.0 text. Its differences from the Unported version are the musical composition royalty paragraphs written against the United States Copyright Act, the absence of a moral rights clause and the absence of a sui generis database rights clause.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"Port of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. The deontic model of this record is identical to the parent CC-BY-SA-4.0, statement for statement: the same permissions with the same duties, the same prohibitions and the same set level duties. The only structural difference left is odrl:target, which the parent extends with dcmitype:Dataset. What differs is the jurisdiction, the language of the legal text and the clause texts, and the version specific clauses of 3.0 that the model does not carry, chiefly the express prohibition of sublicensing, the technological measures clause, the moral rights clause and the royalty collection arrangements. The compatibility checker cannot tell this record from the other records of the BY-SA element set, across all three versions and every jurisdiction the library holds.","action":"none"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:promote was prohibited and no sentence of this text supports it. The statement was the library's reading of a legal default, that a copyright licence which says nothing about endorsement grants no right to it, and it sat in 519 of 581 records as a house convention. That reading is now an adopted dalicc:DefaultRule of the core dependency graph, which supplies it to every licence that is silent about the action, so a compatibility check reaches the same answer and the record states only what the text states. Removed on 2026-09-23; see section 13 of docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md.","action":"applied","change":"# removed\nodrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:promote ] ;\n"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"major","field":"dalicc:terminatesOnBreach","description":"The termination clause of this port reads: \"This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License.\" The licence ends automatically on a breach and this version of the text has no reinstatement clause, so dalicc:terminatesOnBreach is true and no dalicc:curePeriod is written, as on the unported record of the same version.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Creative Commons 3.0 port: United States (US)","port_of":"CC-BY-SA-4.0","variant_kind":"jurisdiction-port","notes":"The parent is the 4.0 International record of the same element set, since the library holds no Unported and no International 3.0 record; the version difference, 3.0 against 4.0, is therefore part of the port relation and not only the jurisdiction. The 3.0 text differs from 4.0 in substance as well: it prohibits sublicensing expressly, it forbids technological protection measures, it has no thirty day cure period for a breach, it settles the royalty collection question per jurisdiction, and its share-alike clause expressly accepts a later version, the Unported licence or another port with the same licence elements. None of that is visible in the model. Nothing in this review is legal advice."}