Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes: >Only recently a legal analysis was posted by Ed Avis that came to the >conclusion that while CC-BY-SA 2.0 may be fine for data, CTs really are >required
The legal analysis looked in detail into the question of how far copyright applies to OSM map data in the USA. But the issue about whether OSM counts as a joint work under US copyright law is something that the two lawyers only briefly touched on. They even suggested to me leaving it out of the final memo altogether, since it was just a starting point for further research - I said I was happy to leave it in. (Briefly, if the work has joint copyright ownership then any owner, meaning potentially any contributor, has full rights to do anything with it, as long as profits are shared among the owners. This is a US peculiarity.) As others have also noted on the legal-talk list, there are good reasons to believe that OSM is not simply a joint work. As with other legal arguments, it fails the "on the ground test" - if OSM is a joint work under US copyright law then a wide variety of works (such as much free software) would fall under the same rule, yet this does not seem to be the case in practice, so there is probably more to it. So I think it is too soon to draw the conclusion that "CTs really are required"; I would not want it to join "copyright does not apply" in the unhappy group of initial legal questions which were converted into often-repeated Internet memes. Further, the lawyers mentioned to me that in order to get around the joint work problem some contributor terms would be needed, but that the particular CTs the OSMF has come up with are not really designed to address the issue. They did not compare the new CTs with the terms the project had before, which essentially said that you agree to license under CC-BY-SA, and which might be equally effective at addressing the joint work problem if it exists. We do not yet know. -- Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
