On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Ed Avis <[email protected]> wrote: > You have discussed some elaborate plans about what data from a > non-relicensing > contributor would have to be deleted and what would have to be kept. > > In the worst case, in the event of a dispute, do you really fancy trying to > convince a court of law that the elaborate heuristics you applied are > sufficient > to make the map completely independent of the work of the users who said > 'no'? > > The only sound rule that can be sure to stand up in court is to delete all > data > from the contributors who didn't give explicit permission, and all data > that > depends on it. Period. > > You may think this is unnecessarily paranoid. Indeed it is: but if the > relicensing exercise doesn't put the project on a legally unassailable > footing, > it is not worth doing. At the moment we can say with certainty that 100% > of the > contributors have clicked 'yes' to an agreement to distribute their changes > under > CC-BY-SA. Any legal niceties tidied up by a move to a different licence > are good > to have, all other things being equal, but are hugely outweighed if the > data > becomes a questionable mishmash of contributions that have agreement, and > those > that don't have agreement but pass some odd set of rules we invented > ourselves to > convince ourselves that we didn't need to get permission. >
I believe this is a wise approach. OSM is traditionally very conservative about using any data not from a know clean source. On the grand scale its relatively easy to capture map data, the value of a clean database far outweighs the risks associated with infringing anyone's copyright. We should apply the same degree of conserativism to our CC-BY-SA licensed data as we would to any other copyrighted data. Perhaps we are thinking about this all wrong. If we considered the ODbL to be a license fork of the project (albeit a friendly from the inside fork) then it makes it much easier to think about how all this should happen. 80n > > -- > Ed Avis <[email protected]> > > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk >
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