Wikidata's CC0 licence and database rights are the reason why there was a proposed amendment[1] to the WMF Terms of Use that was supposed to accompany any upgrade to 4.0. This included the words:

Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you waive these rights. As an example, this means facts you contribute to the projects may be reused freely without attribution.

It was originally thought[2] that Wikidata under CC0 would not be allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source like Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0). 

But in the end, the view prevailed that 3.0 provided enough "wiggle room" regarding database rights to risk the extraction of Wikipedia content to Wikidata. 

Version 4.0, however, removed that "wiggle room" by explicitly including database rights – hence any upgrade to 4.0 would require the above waiver to be added to the Terms of Use, or the relationship between Wikidata and Wikipedia would not be able to continue as before. 

This was explicitly confirmed[3] by WMF Legal Counsel Leighanna Mixter at the time:

"This issue is one of the main reasons we have the sentence about waiving database rights. ... The waiver language we added makes sure that copying facts to Wikidata doesn’t have the CC 4.0 limitations anywhere, so that bits of data can freely be copied over and put under the Wikidata CC0 license.

There was quite a lot of pushback[4] against this proposed waiver in the Terms of Use, in particular from Wikimedians in Europe, where database rights are more established. 

Another sticking point, again particularly for some European users, was that 4.0 itself includes an explicit waiver of "moral rights" as well as "publicity, privacy, and personality rights".[5]

Andreas


On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 8:58 PM Luis Villa <luis@lu.is> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 10:33 AM Luis Villa <luis@lu.is> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 10:03 AM Todd Allen <toddmallen@gmail.com> wrote:
Certainly, any "database rights" should already be considered waived by the CC license ...

No.

All from CC BY-SA 4.0:

1.d: "Copyright and Similar Rights means copyright and/or similar rights closely related to copyright including ... Sui Generis Database Rights ...
1.h: Licensed Material means the ... database ... to which the Licensor applied this Public License.
1.l: Sui Generis Database Rights means rights other than copyright resulting from Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, as amended and/or succeeded, as well as other essentially equivalent rights anywhere in the world.

Section 4 – Sui Generis Database Rights.

Where the Licensed Rights include Sui Generis Database Rights that apply to Your use of the Licensed Material:

  1. for the avoidance of doubt, Section 2(a)(1) grants You the right to extract, reuse, reproduce, and Share all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database;
  2. if You include all or a substantial portion of the database contents in a database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights, then the database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights (but not its individual contents) is Adapted Material, including for purposes of Section 3(b); and
  3. You must comply with the conditions in Section 3(a) if You Share all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database.
For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 4 supplements and does not replace Your obligations under this Public License where the Licensed Rights include other Copyright and Similar Rights.

And to be clear, I think this was a mistake and told CC that at the time; the basics of why I feel that way I collected a year or so later as https://lu.is/blog/2016/09/12/copyleft-and-data-database-law-as-poor-platform/ and some subsequent posts. But 4.0 is what it is - an attempt to shoehorn database rights into a copyright license.

Luis
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