The Urban Water Textbook: Mixing NC and SA Content
A regional college is assembling an open textbook on urban water systems. The team, four lecturers and one instructional designer, wants to publish under CC BY-SA 4.0 and sell print copies through the campus bookstore at cost. The draft combines 14 chapters written in-house; a watershed diagram from a government agency under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; 22 photographs under CC BY 4.0; a data table adapted from an encyclopedia article under CC BY-SA 4.0; and a scanned cross-section figure from a commercial hydrology textbook, used with a note that it is 'for educational use'. A reviewer asks whether the book can carry a single CC BY-SA 4.0 license and whether the NC diagram and the scanned figure can stay. The bookstore's print run is 600 copies, priced at $28 to recover paper and binding.
1. Which components can be merged into a single CC BY-SA 4.0 adaptation, and which cannot?
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Two separate questions: what can be adapted together, and what can only be aggregated.
For one adaptation under a single license:
- In-house chapters and the CC BY 4.0 photographs: compatible with CC BY-SA 4.0, because BY is one-way compatible into BY-SA.
- CC BY-SA 4.0 table: compatible with BY-SA 4.0.
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 diagram: not compatible. Folding an adaptation into a BY-SA 4.0 work would drop the NC restriction, which BY-NC-SA does not allow; keeping NC would break the BY-SA promise for the rest. The two ShareAlike licenses point in different directions.
If the diagram stays, the book cannot be a single BY-SA 4.0 adaptation. It could be a collection: a clearly delimited section under BY-NC-SA 4.0, each part carrying its own license, and the whole described as 'various licenses' rather than one. That works only if the NC part is not remixed into the BY-SA chapters.
2. Is the $28 at-cost print sale commercial use under the NC clause?
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'NonCommercial' means primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. A $28 copy sold at cost by a campus bookstore to recover paper and binding is not aimed at profit, and Creative Commons guidance generally treats cost recovery as non-commercial. Three details matter.
First, 'at cost' must be real: if the price folds in staff time, overhead, or bookstore margin, the argument weakens. Second, the sale is a distribution of the whole book, and a court would look at the transaction, not the intent. Third, if the college later sells at a surplus or licenses the book to a publisher, the analysis changes.
The safe design is to keep the NC diagram out of the printed volume or obtain permission from the agency, and to document the analysis. The educational label is not enough: NC restricts commercial use regardless of who the user is.
3. What attribution is required, and how should the scanned commercial figure be handled?
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Attribution under CC licenses follows TASL: Title, Author, Source (with a link), and License (with a link), plus an indication of changes. Each chapter or figure needs its own credit; a single blanket credit at the front is risky when a figure is reused separately.
Mark modifications explicitly, for example 'adapted from', 'cropped', or 'data updated to 2023'. For the BY-SA table, note the adaptation and the license of the adapted version.
The scanned cross-section is the real problem. 'For educational use' is not a license, and classroom teaching is a different act from publishing and selling 600 copies. The extract likely exceeds any quotation allowance once it is sold. Either obtain written permission from the publisher (including the right to sublicense under CC BY-SA 4.0) or replace it with an openly licensed or redrawn figure. Redrawing an idea in your own words can be legitimate; scanning the original is not.