{"id":"OdcPublicDomainDedicationAndLicence","title":"ODC Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL)","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1-0/","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"PDDL is the Open Data Commons counterpart of CC0: a dedication of a database to the public domain with a licence fallback for jurisdictions where the dedication does not work. The record models it correctly, with every act permitted, no duty anywhere and only the trademark prohibition. Applied: the SPDX identifier and the fallback licence of Section 3.3, quoted into dalicc:additionalClauses.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"The record carried no SPDX identifier. Its cc:legalcode, https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/, is the seeAlso URL of the SPDX entry PDDL-1.0, and the fetched document is headed \"Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) v1.0\". The proposal file rated this medium; the version in the document confirms it. Added.","action":"applied","change":"spdx:licenseId \"PDDL-1.0\" ;"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"dcmitype:Dataset only, which matches a document whose subject is a database and whose Section 2 covers copyright and database rights in the work.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Every act is permitted, which follows Section 3.1: \"The Rightsholder by using this Document, dedicates the Work to the public domain for the benefit of the public and relinquishes all rights in Copyright and Database Rights over the Work.\" dalicc:ChangeLicense among the permissions is right for a dedication.","action":"none"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:promote is the only prohibition and it is supported by Section 4.3: \"This Document does not grant You a licence for any trade marks that the Rightsholder may own or that the Rightsholder may use to cover the Work.\" Section 4.2 does the same for patents, which the vocabulary cannot express as a reservation.","action":"none"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:duty","description":"No duty, which is correct: PDDL imposes no attribution or notice requirement. Section 4.1 says the work is made available \"without any other contractual obligations, either express or implied\" and that a community norms statement is not a contract. The family-rule baseline lists this record among the four where no attribution duty is expected.","action":"none"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"Section 3.3, the licence that applies where the dedication and the waiver are ineffective, was missing. It is the operative clause in those jurisdictions and it repeats that the rights \"explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour\". Quoted verbatim into dalicc:additionalClauses, in the same way as the fallback clause of CC0.","action":"applied","change":"dalicc:additionalClauses \"\"\"Licence of Copyright and Database Rights when Sections 3.1 and 3.2 inapplicable ...\"\"\" ;"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer is Section 5.1 and dalicc:LiabilityLimitation is Sections 5.2 and 5.3, both quoted verbatim. The warranty value begins with a stray leading blank, which is cosmetic and was left alone. Section 3.4, moral rights, and Section 6.4, the jurisdiction rule that decides which of 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 applies, are not carried.","action":"none"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:perpetual are supported: the dedication is unlimited in time and territory, and Section 3.3(a) grants the fallback licence \"for the duration of any applicable Copyright and Database Rights\".","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"As with CC0, nothing in the model says that this is a dedication and not a licence, and the reservation of patent and trade mark rights in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 can only be approximated by the dalicc:promote prohibition. Proposed terms: dalicc:publicDomainDedication and dalicc:patentRightsReserved.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check reports no conflict, before and after the corrections.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The record shares its deontic signature with Cc010Universal, which the review of duplicates (see the review method, docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 3) flags as a cross-family pair. That is correct rather than a defect: both documents dedicate the work and both fall back to a permissive licence. The separation into two records is justified by provenance and by the subject matter, a database against any work. Inside the Open Data Commons family this record is the permissive end, ODC-By the attribution end and ODbL the share-alike end, and all three now carry the same Section 3.1 commercial-use grant in their model.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"minor","field":"record","description":"Standard-license addition of 2026-09-15, decision 9 and 10: the record was corrected against its new siblings and versioned. Library convention 14: the warranty literal carried a padding space inside its quotation marks.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Section 3.3(a), the licence that applies where the dedication and waiver of Sections 3.1 and 3.2 do not, reads: \"The Licensor grants to You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, licence to Use the Work for the duration of any applicable Copyright and Database Rights.\" The licence defines Database Rights as the sui generis database right, so the permission is text-supported; without it, the proposed EU and UK default rule reads the licence as not granting the right it exists to grant. dalicc:suiGenerisDatabaseRights is permitted, with no duty, as the dedication asks for nothing.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:promote was prohibited with no sentence of the text quoted for it. The only sentence near the subject, \"This Document does not cover any trade marks associated with the Database.\" (Section 2.2(c)), leaves trademarks outside the dedication and says nothing about endorsement, which is silence; since 2026-09-23 what a silent licence grants about endorsement is the adopted default rule of the core dependency graph, not a statement of the record (see section 13 of docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md). Removed, as on the ODbL record.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Open Data Commons (ODbL, PDDL, ODC-By)","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"The three Open Data Commons documents share a drafting skeleton, section numbering included, so a clause-by-clause comparison between them is reliable. Nothing in this review is legal advice."}