Anthony, Anthony wrote: > I looked at the license and I said "Why are they bothering with this > crap? It's not like this stuff is copyrightable in the first place. > Well, I guess that this stuff is protected by some laws in some > jurisdictions, so CC-BY-SA is useful for waiving those rights in those > jurisdictions. For me, in a state with sane laws, I don't have to worry > about it. What the heck, sure, I'll license my data under CC-BY-SA. > Can't hurt."
Ah, now I get it. You are a PD advocate by heart like myself, and you were actually *happy* with the non-working CC-BY-SA. Or put it this way, for you the major point of CC-BY-SA was the "you are granted the following rights..." bit (which wasn't required for your jurisdiction but might have been in others), and you sort of ignored the "under the following conditions..." bit. It's nice to see that point of view, given that some people endlessly drone on about how there was a "consensus" in OSM to have a share-alike license; now there's you having "consented" to CC-BY-SA but only because you knew it wasn't binding for you anyway. Sweet! I am also pro-PD but I am based in Europe where it is less clear which aspects of CC-BY-SA work and which don't; for me, ODbL at least brings more safety and clarity about what is allowed and what isn't, so I will support it. If I were in the States where it seems blatantly obvious that CC-BY-SA doesn't protect our data, and thus ODbL only adds restrictions, I might think differently. However, one thing you should perhaps consider is this argument of "project sanity": We're all in this together. It's no good having a license that has different effects in different countries. This has the potential to disrupt community efforts - a US-based project using OSM data but people from Europe cannot participate for fear of prosecution in their countries. Or, you are a US company and create an OSM based product but cannot sell to Europe because your customers fear legal trouble. ODbL doesn't completely harmonise jurisdictions but it goes a long way there, and I find this desirable. Another thing is of course the "moral" component. The non-working CC-BY-SA in your country might let you get away with taking OSM data, printing a map from it and claiming full copyright on that. But even if legally non-working, the community still expects you to adhere to the share-alike terms of the license, and will scorn you for that activity. Whereas with ODbL, this is perfectly allowed, and will be accepted by the community. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
