Hi @Debbie and all,
@efujioka good that you could resolve your situation in this way and receive an unambiguous answer.
Inheritance of rights and license agreements so far is generally not sufficiently taken into consideration by our community. As soon as one asks a data provider to assign a data license, they actually should also at the same step identify who will inherit the “say” for the data, or at least whom you can contact for further inquiries (see eg. here). Defaults that could be suggested might be the public commons (eg. CC0), the original data provider’s institution (which might be the rights holder in the first place since a grant under which the data was collected was to them), a data mediator/aggregator or a more specific agent (eg. individual, organization).
Our workshop at TDWG2022 (Thanks for the ad, Deb!) is focused on data within scholarly publications, which is similar though not completely so to data in data infrastructures. What can be learnt from the publications/library sector is that one major problem with pre-existing/legacy publications is the legal uncertainty that surrounds them. Has copyright been passed on (over generations)? Thus, does copyright still apply or is the publication now in the public commons? Whom to contact?
Thus, such a situation should be avoided by from the start clarifying the legal context already with a long-term perspective in mind.