Open but Incompatible: A License Compatibility Analysis of Corpora for Low-Resource African Languages

A new audit of over twenty African NLP corpus families reveals widespread license incompatibilities, including CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC datasets that cannot be legally combined and NoDerivs clauses that prohibit tokenisation. The study documents four failure modes with primary-source evidence, such as the JW300 corpus removed from OPUS for Terms of Service violations and the WAXAL corpus misrepresenting its license. The paper provides a due diligence checklist and legally clean enrichment opportunities for low-resource African languages.

arXiv:2606.28867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Creative Commons licenses dominate African NLP corpus releases, but their compatibility rules are rarely applied. CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC cannot be combined in a single published dataset; a NoDerivs clause silently prohibits tokenisation and annotation. This paper audits the license provenance of over twenty corpus families used in African NLP, constructs a six-tier compatibility matrix, and applies it to three case-study languages: Kituba/Munukutuba, Zarma, and Moore. Four failure modes are documented with primary-source evidence: outright prohibition JW300, removed from OPUS after a legal audit confirmed Terms of Service violation ; composite license misrepresentation WAXAL, whose CC-BY 4.0 claim is contradicted by its own HuggingFace dataset card ; a NoDerivs clause hidden behind a CC-BY label Tanzil ; and data persistence failure the Congolese Radio Corpus, where 402 of 405 source URLs are now dead . A pre-annotation due diligence checklist and a survey of legally clean enrichment opportunities close the paper.