Jason, While I'm not a laywer, copyright and public domain are my bread and butter.
There are a number of issues at work here, but the first and most important thing to say is that you simply cannot say "This work is dedicated to the public domain" and have that be sufficient for these purposes here, for the following reasons: 1. It is not legally applicable in every country. Since every country's public domain laws differ, saying that you dedicate the work to the public domain may not be effective everywhere. 2. The CC0 license is explicit about which specific rights you're giving up, and the mechanism by which you're giving them up. That means it will be more likely to hold up in court, should a situation arise. 3. The CC0 license requires that you claim ownership of the work. That's an important distinction, because when you declare that you are the owner, you can place the work under a license, but this ownership must be made explicit. I'm in regular contact with folks at Creative Commons and if simple PD dedication was enough, their job would be much easier. :) - Serge On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 11:38 PM, Jason Remillard <[email protected] > wrote: > Hi Serge, > > On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Serge Wroclawski <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Randal, > > > > Thanks for making this page and engaging in the import process. > > > > Regarding the license, in the United States, only the Federal government > can > > place something in the Public Domain (it's a very specific term that has > > legal meaning), so if their intent is to make the data as public as > > possible, then I suggest that they place the data under a CC0 license (or > > some other very permissive license), or if they can't do that, there's a > > process by which they can donate the data to OSM. We need a document > > showing that the license is OSM compatible, and that's tricky. Even if > the > > license were the same as OSM is now (ODbL), then there are issues because > > OSM itself may change licenses in the future (in fact, it's nearly > > guaranteed to do so at some point, if only to upgrade to a new ODbL). > > Assuming they own the copyright on the data, they are allowed to give > up those rights and release the data into the public domain. > > http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/ > > This is not true in other places outside the US. > > > > > In addition, as has already been discussed by others- we need to see the > > actual data in its original form to evaluate it- and of course we'd like > > ideally, to have the conversion script used to convert the data from its > > upstream format (presumably Shapefile) to the OSM form. In absence of > that, > > though, the original data and the .osm files. > > I agree, Randal, when you are ready post some osm files for review. No > need to upload it to do the review. > > Thanks > Jason >
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