Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
On 21 March 2011 14:53, David Groom revi...@pacific-rim.net wrote: - Original Message - From: Michael Collinson m...@ayeltd.biz To: Licensing and other legal discussions. legal-talk@openstreetmap.org Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2011 4:23 PM Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license - A member of the OSMF board or LWG takes up the particular issue. This depends very much on personal enthusiasm. It requires initial tact - most instances are neglect/cannot be bothered rather than purely wilful. It requires persistance and follow-up, - we generally get an oh we will fix it immediately ... and then they don't. It requires careful coordination within the OSM/OSMF community to provide a united front. It may require research - for example, how exactly should a TV ad provide a CC-BY-SA atttibution? And lastly, future cases may involve bumping up to formal legal help and legal action. Not easy for one person to do. I certainly agree that taking legal action should be low on any list. It can be expensive, risky and time consuming. If you want to prevent unattributed uses and so on, having a dedicated team of volunteers to work out the best approaches (and different approaches will work in different ways in different circumstances) is probably best. Whether you want to do that is another matter. [snip] Ignoring the practicalities above, once someone has agreed to the CT's they effectively assign the majority of their rights to OSMF in respect of data held by OSMF, with that assignment of rights I question from a legal point of view who but the OSMF are actually able to follow up legal breaches. They don't assign their rights. The CT's don't operate like that. This isn't just a pedantic observation, but quite important when it comes to enforcement in the UK (it will differ in other jurisdictions of course). Here the copyright owner or owners must eventually join in any claim, although a licensee may, in certain circumstances, be able to obtain interim relief such as an injunction. There are ways around this with the permission of the court, but it would require some care to bring a claim. There's also a possibility that some IP is jointly owned or (in the case of the database right) owned by OSMF. Certainly if someone contributes substantial IP to OSM they don't lose the right to sue for an infringement of that IP. That is why talking of an assignment is misleading. -- Francis Davey ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
Hi, Robert Kaiser wrote: I think all that is needed is a clear statement from OSMF saying that they don't feel responsible for chasing up violators Such a statement would invite everyone to use our data freely and without attribution or license care as it basically says the organization governing the product/data doesn't care anyhow. It is my belief that the organisation shouldn't waste resources on this except, as outlined in my message, in very grave cases. Anything else should be handled, as outlined in my message, by the community (if they want). Effectively policing *any* license would very likely require a *multiple* of OSMF's whole current budget. Do you want to stand before mappers and tell them for every pound we spend for servers to make mapping a nicer experience, we spend five pounds to seek out and punish license violators? Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
Francis wrote: I certainly agree that taking legal action should be low on any list. It can be expensive, risky and time consuming. +1 If you want to prevent unattributed uses and so on, having a dedicated team of volunteers to work out the best approaches (and different approaches will work in different ways in different circumstances) is probably best. Whether you want to do that is another matter. Should we want to be attributed ? To satisfy pedantic ego inside us ? Can we never give something to the world without asking back ??? Do we need to be cited ? Does anyone read attributions ? None of us can enforce any license to any serious player on the market trying to steal our data. Commercial maps are a business of millions of dollars. Any legal action is wasting (our) lots money, and even worse, will not lead to any compensations, as we don't make money with our data (so we can't lose any either -but for the enforcement-) I mean, what will be the net result of such an enforcement, as we do not benefit nor loose from the mere fact that our license/attribution is being respected or not. Enforcing licenses/attributions is a sure way to lose what we do have in plenty: -the open and free image -sympathy among literally hundreds of thousands -information about our world to give to its citizen in wealth and in disaster The only way to go is making OSM free as in free ! Free OSM effectively stops the big players of making money with geodata and that is the only way we can actually enforce that what we actually promise on our (wiki)home page: OpenStreetMap creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways Gert ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
- Original Message - From: Michael Collinson m...@ayeltd.biz To: Licensing and other legal discussions. legal-t...@openstreetmap.org Sent: Sunday, March 20, 2011 4:23 PM Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license This is a general question for discussion from the License Working Group. I may also ask on the main list as the constituency is different. There are now 1 to 2 reports every month of folks violating OSM's license by using OSM's data or maps without any or without adequate CC-BY-SA attribution and they take several weeks to fix on average. These are mostly websites but include poster advertising, a TV advertisement and a TV show. This has sort of landed in the LWG's lap by default but we feel we are not dealing with the issues adequately and some issues not at all. We welcome suggestions on a better system. Our main function is the internal license change, and until that is done, we really don't have the resource to handle external matters like this. Here's a run down of what happens at the moment: - At the very minimum, we want to keep make a public record of alleged violations to show that these things do not pass un-noticed and to provide a central point for collating frequency and the nature of the problem. So far, if the LWG hears a report, we document the basics in a Hall of Shame section of our weekly meeting minutes, http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes - A member of the OSMF board or LWG takes up the particular issue. This depends very much on personal enthusiasm. It requires initial tact - most instances are neglect/cannot be bothered rather than purely wilful. It requires persistance and follow-up, - we generally get an oh we will fix it immediately ... and then they don't. It requires careful coordination within the OSM/OSMF community to provide a united front. It may require research - for example, how exactly should a TV ad provide a CC-BY-SA atttibution? And lastly, future cases may involve bumping up to formal legal help and legal action. Not easy for one person to do. Whilst this may not be easy for one person to do, I would say it is impossible for the community to do. Tact, is something quite often missing from the community careful co-ordination within the OSM/OSMF community is something impossible to achieve without a co-ordinator. Once you have a co-ordinator you have the defacto starting of a committee. Ignoring the practicalities above, once someone has agreed to the CT's they effectively assign the majority of their rights to OSMF in respect of data held by OSMF, with that assignment of rights I question from a legal point of view who but the OSMF are actually able to follow up legal breaches. Lastly, if we are taking data from 3rd parties (or indeed individual contributors) who have agreed it can be used by OSMF on the condition there is attribution, then surely there is a moral responsibility, if not a legal duty, for OSMF to do their utmost to agree that attribution takes place. If the LWG is not the appropriate body to undertake such a task then another body should be set up, but leaving it to the community does not seem a viable option. David Mike LWG ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
Frederik Ramm schrieb: I think all that is needed is a clear statement from OSMF saying that they don't feel responsible for chasing up violators Such a statement would invite everyone to use our data freely and without attribution or license care as it basically says the organization governing the product/data doesn't care anyhow. If our data was PD, that would be OK, but as it isn't and won't be, OSMF needs to care as it is the governing body behind the project. Robert Kaiser ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
On 03/21/2011 06:31 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
Effectively policing *any* license would very likely require a
*multiple* of OSMF's whole current budget.
The FSF has one paid compliance officer to look after the whole of GNU
and any other cases that they get involved in.
gpl-violations.org is all volunteers.
For the projects I've spoken to, enforcement is usually a phone call,
not a court case.
Do you want to stand before
mappers and tell them for every pound we spend for servers to make
mapping a nicer experience, we spend five pounds to seek out and punish
license violators?
It's not just about the experience on OSM's servers, it's about the
experience wherever the data is encountered.
I think both competent volunteers and any paid roles that take less than
${ARBITRARY_AMOUNT} of the budget are good investments in keeping the O
in OSM.
- Rob.
___
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legal-t...@openstreetmap.org
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[OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
This is a general question for discussion from the License Working Group. I may also ask on the main list as the constituency is different. There are now 1 to 2 reports every month of folks violating OSM's license by using OSM's data or maps without any or without adequate CC-BY-SA attribution and they take several weeks to fix on average. These are mostly websites but include poster advertising, a TV advertisement and a TV show. This has sort of landed in the LWG's lap by default but we feel we are not dealing with the issues adequately and some issues not at all. We welcome suggestions on a better system. Our main function is the internal license change, and until that is done, we really don't have the resource to handle external matters like this. Here's a run down of what happens at the moment: - At the very minimum, we want to keep make a public record of alleged violations to show that these things do not pass un-noticed and to provide a central point for collating frequency and the nature of the problem. So far, if the LWG hears a report, we document the basics in a Hall of Shame section of our weekly meeting minutes, http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes - A member of the OSMF board or LWG takes up the particular issue. This depends very much on personal enthusiasm. It requires initial tact - most instances are neglect/cannot be bothered rather than purely wilful. It requires persistance and follow-up, - we generally get an oh we will fix it immediately ... and then they don't. It requires careful coordination within the OSM/OSMF community to provide a united front. It may require research - for example, how exactly should a TV ad provide a CC-BY-SA atttibution? And lastly, future cases may involve bumping up to formal legal help and legal action. Not easy for one person to do. Mike LWG ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
there is this page in the wiki http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lacking_proper_attribution to document and keep trace. cheers, Martin ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license
Mike, There are now 1 to 2 reports every month of folks violating OSM's license by using OSM's data or maps without any or without adequate CC-BY-SA attribution and they take several weeks to fix on average. I agree that this should not burden the LWG. We have this community-run lacking proper attribution web site which sadly got off to a bit of a wrong start, looking more like a witch hunt than a place for complaints, with vigilantes actively trawling the web for anything that might look like a license violation. But basically I think this is something the community should do; and if they aren't interested then it shouldn't be done. I firmly believe that OSMF should *not* routinely get involved, and if ever OSMF were to involve lawyers then only in an extremely high-profile case (major mapping provider uses OSM without telling or so). Anything else must be run by the (ideally local) community. I think all that is needed is a clear statement from OSMF saying that they don't feel responsible for chasing up violators, and outlining a suggested community process for dealing with the problem without being an embarassement to the project. Personally I think that name and shame should be the utmost we do with violators, and legal steps should neither be threatened nor initiated except in very grave circumstances. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
