2009/12/11 James Livingston <doc...@mac.com>: > Some other potential points against using copyright transfer: > * Given one of the arguments against CC-BY-SA is that in some jurisdictions > the data isn't subject to copyright, copyright assignment of the data would > be a bit questionable. > * Businesses and government department are unlikely to want to assign > copyright to someone else, assuming that they are even the actual copyright > holder. > * A lot of people won't want to do that. Quite a few people won't work on > various open-source projects because they require assignment. > * You'd probably need to be a lot more careful. I believe that there are > some jurisdictions where signing copyright transfer paperwork for something > you aren't the copyright holder of is a lot more serious than plain > copyright infringement. > * You wouldn't be able to use data you personally collected, except under > the ODbL (the last part of the second sentence on the second paragraph > above). > > The downside of not requiring copyright assignment is that OSMF can't sue > for copyright infringement of the data.
I think the plan was to use some very liberal license for the data (as opposed to database) which would not let them sue for copyright infringement anyway, because the license basically can't be infringed? But if the foundation wants to have copyright in the data I think it's trivial for it to have some by doing *some* of the maintenance edits on behalf of the foundation or one person (or more) transferring their rights instead of everyone doing this. Out of curiosity, could the license at all work if contributors didn't have to assign copyright *nor* database rights? Apart from the fact that updating the license would require a new vote (or licensing under ODbL v1+, similar to GPLv2+), but could that be done? Cheers _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
