Hi, On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, you may think Creative Commons is "stupid", but I hope others will > give them a chance and listen to what they have to say. I think they will, > considering that Creative Commons is well known and respected, compared to > Open Data Commons, who doesn't even seem to have an article on Wikipedia.
I also tend to side with Creative Commons. It is not very wise of ODbL proponents to claim that CC say that CC-BY-SA doesn't work for data without also admitting that CC recommend CC0 for data. Matt Amos wrote: > i have listened to what they have to say, and it makes perfect sense. > they recognise that databases like OSM's don't have much basis for > protection in copyright law, so they correctly deduce that there are > two options: > > 1) drop requirements enforced by copyright law. this results in a > "PD-like" license, to whit: CC0. > 2) enforce requirements by law other than copyright law. this results > in a database rights/contract license, to whit: ODbL. > > creative commons decided, as a policy, that option (1) was preferable, > as it places fewer restrictions on the use of the data. however, it > drops the share-alike and attribution requirements. they clearly felt > that this would provide the best benefit to the scientific community. This "as a policy" is something that Steve claims as well, implying that rather than working things out, they just decreed something. But I don't think this does them justice, and anyone who has followed legal-talk should know. They claim to have invested considerable brainpower in finding a share-alike license (or, at least, an attribution license) for data that works, and failed. One of the big obstacles they saw was endless attribution chains. There was a posting in John Wilbanks' blog about this: http://network.nature.com/people/wilbanks/blog/2007/12/17/open-access-data-boring-but-important Proponents of the ODbL are of the opinion that CC simply were too skeptical, that a license which CC thought wouldn't be good enough is indeed good enough. But that's not a matter of "policy", that's a matter of judgment. You an accuse them of bad judgment but you cannot accuse them of blindly choosing a license "out of policy". Or if you do, then OSM sticking to share-alike is just the same kind of "policy". The best rebuttal of the CC (or Science Commons, to be more precise) position came, like so often, from Richard Fairhurst, here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-March/002317.html In short, he says that Science Commons was thinking too much about research and education, and that thus their results may not necessarily apply to OSM. If your prime example of data is, say, a deciphered human genome, then it is understandable that you'd rather not have endless layers of some kind of viral license slapped onto that. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
