InfoReseaux remarked that this data is suspicious, to say the least: CC BY-NC 4.0 but contains ODbL licensed data coming from Openstreetmap - but also from Microsoft.

Thread on the Openstreetmap forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/is-globalbuildingatlas...

Christian Quest sent the following message to the authors:

"I’m writing to you because I’m surprised by the choice of data license you’ve set on the GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset.

As mentioned and explained in your paper, at least two data sources you’ve been using to create this dataset are under the Open Database License (ODbL): OpenStreetMap and Microsoft building datasets.

I’ve downloaded the extract of data you’re proposing to have a look at the final dataset, and it confirms that building polygons from OSM (and Microsoft) are present in the resulting dataset in a substantial portion.

In such case, your dataset must be published under the ODbL licence (see 4.2), because it is a derivative database (see 1.0 of ODbL license for definition).

A copy of this message has also been sent to the Legal Working Group of the OSM Foundation.

Thanks in advance to fix quickly the license of the dataset you published. This will also allow OpenStreetMap contributors to use it to improve OpenStreetMap, which is not possible with the CC-BY-NC you choose."