Hi, (taking this to legal-talk from talk where it doesn't belong)
On 02/13/12 00:00, nicholas.g.lawre...@tmr.qld.gov.au wrote:
I accepted the license, and also ticked the box that said I was happy with my contributions to be considered public domain. Hypothetically, if some years in the future, OSMF proposed a switch to public domain, can they assume my acceptance from that?
OSMF could certainly release *your* contributions under Public Domain (since you have checked the box, and "advisory" or not, there would be a reasonably solid legal basis for doing that).
Regarding a possible future switch to Public Domain, this is a difficult issue. In theory, OSMF can choose to switch to any "free and open" license if 2/3 of active mappers agree. PD is a "free and open" license so that would be possible, providing that enough mappers find it a good idea.
At the same time, OSMF promises in the CT "to attribute You or the copyright owner. A mechanism will be provided, currently a web page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution.";
This can be read - as Simon seems to do it - to mean "the CTs guarantee that required attribution will survive any future licence changes", but I think he's on thin ice there; in my reading, the CTs promise that OSMF will provide attribution, not that OSMF will only ever release your data under licenses that guarantee attribution down the line.
But Simon is right when he says "data with such requirements would have to be removed". This means that if we ever wanted to go PD, then we'd have to find out which data has some kind of attribution requirement attached, and remove that data before we go PD. Since we don't require such data to be identified at the moment, that would be one hell of a job.
In my eyes, this is a very sad development that undermines any future license change, even one to a non-PD license. Earlier versions of the CT basically required you to *only* contribute data of which you could surely say that it could be relicensed freely under the provisions of "free and open" and "2/3 of mappers agree". This as been whittled down to "you can contribute anything that is compatible with the current license and you don't even have to *tell* us what further restrictions it is under". Any future license change has therefore become very unlikely - except maybe a switch back to a CC license -, and not much remains of the license change provision in the CTs.
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
