Ed, the question "what avenues do we have open if someone breaches the contract" has been discussed on legal-talk, for example in this thread:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2008-February/000637.html I don't know if the License Working Group have pursued this further in the mean time; at the time, we arrived at roughly the same conclusion that you did (we can sue them for damages but if there are no damages then there's no case). Someone brought up the idea of "punitive damages" but I don't believe in it. So yes, this is a weak point - the whole contractual element of the ODbL is a very weak point indeed as it is very conceivable that violators will claim they never entered into the contract in the first place. However, you are wrong in alluding that there is a choice: > I am concerned that the ODBL throws this away by explicitly stating > that 'the ODbL is also an agreement in contract'. Does that not > weaken the ability to take out injunctions or seek other equitable > remedies against those who violate the licence? It is quite clear (at least to me) that our data cannot be protected by copyright alone; but if our data is not protected by copyright, and if the jurisdiction in question does not have a "sui generis" database law, then we do not have the option to build a "permission based" license because nobody needs permission to use our data! So, and that takes us back to RichardF being quoted in the posting cited at the beginning, the ODbL at least *tries* to use all avenues open to us. The Science Commons people, righly, say that it is morally doubtful to claim copyright where none exists, and I think in this vein the ODbL is morally superior to CC-BY-SA for OSM data, because the latter is based on copyright which in all likelihood does not exist for OSM data. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk