Hi, Ed Avis wrote: >> if we carry on licensing CC BY-SA we may get to the state where CC >> BY-SA is challenged. if the challenge is in the US, i think there's a >> good chance of OSMF losing, > > Would that be such a disaster? If such a precedent were set, then any > factual data derived from OSM would also be in the public domain in that > country, and could be shared freely and incorporated into the project, > giving just the same result as if CC-BY-SA were in force.
No, that would be great. My personal belief is that OSMF is going over the top with this whole share-alike thing. ODbL may be a working license, but the question whether we want or need share-alike to achieve our goals is a wholly different one - a question where from day one we had a small but vocal number of project members saying that share-alike is a must, and OSMF never had the balls to question, or even challenge, that. Indeed, the very first "official" statements from OSMF already contained what is still the official chicken wording today: "[A PD license is] unlikely to be adopted by all.", or "unlikely to be palatable to many OSM contributors". What this has in effect done is given them (the OSM contributors who are against public domain) a veto right - without even counting how many of them there are. Which is strange, given that it is near certain that ODbL will "not be adpoted by all" and "not be palatable to many OSM contributors" (simply because there are so many to start with). With the ODbL this does not seem too important - if push comes to shove we're willing to delete and re-create data which is not re-licensed by the respective contributors; but for the PD cause, the fact that there were hardliners unwilling to agree was used as the reason for not pursuing this. I'm happy that the license working group has done a lot of work to present us with the best possible share-alike license for our data. As Matt concedes, this license still has weaknesses, some of which may be fixable at a later date, and others may just be results of trying to be free and enforcing something at the same time. We are now at a point where we have a clear alternative; go ODbL, or go PD. (Or stay with CC-BY-SA but I really think that sticking to the CC-BY-SA is more an expression of wishful thinking that anything else.) PD, of course, has weaknesses too. Still I'm inclined to think that the problems and weaknesses incurred by PD will hurt less than those incurred by ODbL. PD is easy to understand, provides maximum usefulness of our data in all possible circumstances, and requires absolutely zero man-hours of work tracking down "violators"; creates no community friction because over-eager license vigilantes have to be reined in; poses no risk of seducing OSMF to spend lots of money on lawyers; allows us to concentrate on or core competencies. But to get back to your initial sentence; if OSM were proven to be copyright-free because it contains only factual data, then any factual addition to OSM would probably be copyright-free in that country as well, but if we then take that and put it back into OSM, maybe the author would sue us in another country (he extracts the data in the US where this is free, then transfers it to the UK, then enriches and sells it; we take it, upload it, he sues us in the UK - something like that). It's a mean world out there and if someone wants to create trouble for us they will always find a way. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
