{"id":"AttributionNoncommercial20Germany","title":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Germany","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/legalcode","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The record models the BY-NC element set of the Creative Commons 2.0 port for Germany and it does so correctly: the NonCommercial element prohibits cc:CommercialUse, the attribution and notice duties hang on the acts that make the work public. The legal text was read in German and the permissions, prohibitions and duties all follow from the grant and restriction sections of the port. Corrections applied: dct:source. What remains are proposals that touch the whole Creative Commons family rather than this record: the express prohibition of sublicensing, and the asset types.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"dct:source","description":"The record carried cc:legalcode but no dct:source. The legal-code page states the canonical URL of the licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/, 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-nc/2.0/de/> ;"},{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"SPDX has no identifier for this port. The legal-code URL implies CC-BY-NC-2.0-DE, which the SPDX licence list does not define, so no identifier was invented. Of the thirty six records in this review group only the German NonCommercial-ShareAlike port has an SPDX identifier.","action":"none"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:target","description":"The record targets dalicc:CreativeWork only, while the 4.0 International parent CC-BY-NC-4.0 targets dalicc:CreativeWork and dcmitype:Dataset. Creative Commons licences are media neutral, and this port grants the rights in all media and formats now known or later devised. Aligning the ports with the parents is a single library wide decision covering every Creative Commons port, so it is left as a proposal rather than applied in thirty six records alone.","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. Ziffer 3 grants a \"lizenzgebührenfreies, räumlich und zeitlich (für die Dauer des Urheberrechts oder verwandten Schutzrechts) unbeschränktes einfaches Nutzungsrecht\", a simple right of use unlimited in place and time. The grant covers reproduction, incorporation into collections, distribution, public display, public performance and communication to the public, and the creation and reproduction of derivative works, which the record models as odrl:reproduce, odrl:distribute, odrl:display, odrl:present, odrl:derive and cc:DerivativeWorks.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The record permits dalicc:chargeDistributionFee while prohibiting cc:CommercialUse. Ziffer 4: \"Sie dürfen die in Ziffer 3 gewährten Nutzungsrechte in keiner Weise verwenden, die hauptsächlich auf einen geschäftlichen Vorteil oder eine vertraglich geschuldete geldwerte Vergütung abzielt oder darauf gerichtet ist.\" The vocabulary defines dalicc:chargeDistributionFee as a fee covering the act of providing the work to a third party, so a pure cost recovery fee is arguable under the commercial advantage test of the other five ports, but the statement sits uneasily next to the prohibition and the Japanese port has no such test at all. The same statement is in the 4.0 International parent CC-BY-NC-4.0 and in all one hundred and forty five NonCommercial records of the library, so removing it is one library wide decision, not a defect of this port.","action":"proposed","change":"remove:\n    odrl:permission [ a odrl:Permission ;\n            odrl:action dalicc:chargeDistributionFee ]"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The licence forbids sublicensing and the record does not say so. Ziffer 4: \"Sie dürfen den Schutzgegenstand nicht unterlizenzieren.\" The vocabulary already has dalicc:sublicense, but it is used by no record in the library 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 thirty six ports 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, 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: the licence requires a copy of, or the URI for, the licence with every copy, that all notices referring to the licence and the warranty disclaimer be kept intact, and that credit be given to the author. The German port owes attribution to the \"Urheber oder Rechteinhaber\" (author or rights holder) rather than to an \"original author\", and names the granting party \"Lizenzgeber\" and the requesting party \"Rechtsinhaber\". The attribution clause also names a database (\"Datenbank\") next to derivative works and collections, which the English texts do not. The duties hang on odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive, which matches the licence, since the duties are triggered by making the work public rather than by private use.","action":"none"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer and dalicc:LiabilityLimitation are quoted verbatim from the German text of this port and not from the English unported version, and they match the disclaimer and the limitation sections of the legal code.","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 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:Germany, which matches the country of the legal-code URL, and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual, which matches the grant for the duration of copyright. Ziffer 8: \"Auf diesen Lizenzvertrag findet das Recht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Anwendung.\" 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. Ziffer 4: \"Sie dürfen den Schutzgegenstand mit keinen technischen Schutzmaßnahmen versehen, die den Zugang oder den Gebrauch des Schutzgegenstandes in einer Weise kontrollieren, die mit den Bedingungen dieser Lizenz im Widerspruch stehen.\" 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 to every recipient of the work has none either. Proposed term: dalicc:downstreamOffer.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"Ziffer 4 keeps the grant within the limits of the personality rights of authors and performers: the permission \"findet ihre gesetzliche Grenze in den Persoenlichkeitsrechten der Urheber und ausuebenden Kuenstler, deren berechtigte geistige und persoenliche Interessen bzw. deren Ansehen oder Ruf nicht dadurch gefaehrdet werden duerfen\". Not expressible with the present vocabulary.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The German 2.0 port carries no collecting-society clause at all: the word \"Verwertungsgesellschaft\" does not appear in any of the six German 2.0 legal texts. The GEMA clause that readers associate with the German ports was added in the 3.0 port, not here. The Australian, South African and Polish 2.0 ports of the same version do carry such a clause, so this is a real divergence inside one version.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check with the forty one 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":"Port of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. After the 4.0 parents were themselves corrected, the deontic model of this record is identical to the parent, statement for statement, apart from odrl:target: the same permissions with the same duties, the same prohibitions and the same set level duties. What differs is the jurisdiction, the language of the legal text and the clause texts, and the version specific clauses of 2.0 that the model does not carry, chiefly the express prohibition of sublicensing, the technological measures clause and the royalty collection arrangements. The compatibility checker cannot tell this record from the other records of the BY-NC 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: \"Dieser Lizenzvertrag und die durch ihn eingeräumten Nutzungsrechte enden automatisch bei jeder Verletzung der Vertragsbedingungen durch Sie.\" 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 2.0 port: Germany (DE)","port_of":"CC-BY-NC-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 or International 2.0 record; the version difference, 2.0 against 4.0, is therefore part of the port relation and not only the jurisdiction. The 2.0 text differs from 4.0 in substance as well: it prohibits sublicensing expressly, it has no thirty day cure period for a breach, it has no sui generis database rights clause, and it settles the royalty collection question per jurisdiction. None of that is visible in the model. Nothing in this review is legal advice."}