I maintain some lists of taxon names from publications, licensed under CC0. The GBIF Backbone Taxonomy is licensed CC BY 4.0. I have linked the taxon names in my lists to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy through the GBIF ID; as far as I know, that is allowed regardless of licenses. However, I would also like to include the GBIF ID of the accepted names. If I did that, technically a small segment of the GBIF dataset (namely, which synonym IDs are linked to which accepted name IDs, for a subset of the synonyms) would be included in my (CC0) dataset. Would that be okay?
It is a debatable question what exactly in taxonomy can have a copyright. It needs to be a creative act as far as I understand law. In the extremes a name on it’s own clearly cannot be copyrighted, the full original description with it’s exact graphic layout, fonts, images etc definitely is. A taxonomic concept sounds potentially applicable to me, but it is really an open question.
I would not worry to much as long as you manually craft your dataset. We should just all issue CC0 for our data!
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