[OSM-legal-talk] CTs and the 1 April deadline

Mike Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Thu Jan 6 16:57:12 GMT 2011


At 10:11 PM 5/01/2011, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>Mike,
>
>>I have provisionally added Francis' suggested wording but would like
>>to run it by other License Working Group members. It may help NearMap
>>and similar situations.
>
>The major change in all this, compared to the earlier versions, is the concept that you may now contribute data that is not re-licensable, right? I.e. while we require that you agree to the CT, you can still add data that is, say, "some form of share-alike only" which would then have to be removed later. Is that correct?

I'd slightly reword it to: The concept is that you may now contribute data that may not necessarily be re-licensable under a future license.

The main motive behind it is that it simply recognises reality ... that is what folks who see data imports/derivations as important are doing already. *Personally*, I have come around to the opinion that any data import that is not effectively PD or has just a first-level attribution is somewhat evil in that it restricts future OSM generations, we've no idea what the year 2061 OSM license debate will be about.  But counter to that another contributor to this thread, Andrzej?, has pointed out, it is hypocritical to attach strings to our own license and not expect others to do the same.

Now, the questions, starting with Question 2.

Yes, it is feasible, and given that at least one contributor has been pointlessly editing my personal contributions apparently so that they are no longer "ODbL-ready", sickly sadly all too possible.  Leaving out the proposed insertion "and to the extent that you are able to do so" from clause 2 would kill it off.  

And ...

>Question 1:
>
>How would we, later, during some form of relicensing, know which is which? Is there some way, or even requirement, for the contributing user to tell us which license any derived material that he's contributing comes under?

The bull-shit answer is that we'll develop the technology as we go along.  The honest answer is, real difficult. The bureaucrat in me thinks we are lax on knowing what derived material is in our database.  Even when it is on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue it has been a tiring struggle to get the basics on what license terms apply where.  It would be great to have an "approved list" and then community discussion on any new source ... but a) it is a boring subject for most, and b) it kills the spontaneous and individuallistic nature of our project. Ideas welcome.

and then to the suggestion:


>Question 2:
>
>Say we have a die-hard "my contributions are mine alone" person who wants to be asked for his ok in any future license change, thereby circumventing the usual "if 2/3 of active mappers agree then your data remains in the new database" rule.
>
>Could someone, of that disposition, let's call him A, not simply do the following: Make a contract with person B that says "Dear B, you may use my data but only under ODBL 1.0 and nothing else"; then instruct B to upload the stuff to OSM. Now the data is in OSM, but in the event of any later license change, B (and therefore A) would have to be consulted.
>
>Crucially, this restriction would also apply should A ever lose interest, or die, or be otherwise unreachable. This would effectively kill the whole reason why we have the license change rule in the first place.
>
>Suggestion:
>
>If my above thoughts are correct, and if this cannot be remedied - i.e. if we have to accept that there will always be "fully CT compatible" data and other, "not relicensable without agreement from rights holder" data - then may I suggest that we devise a way to flag such data in the database, and to somehow make the restricted-use data "inert" so that we don't (again, over the years) create a situation where many contributors erect their work on a foundation that may be taken away from them at any time?
>
>I.e., when you upload something then you should explicitly say: "What I'm uploading here is to the best of my knowledge free of rights of others", or you would say "What I'm uploading here is compatible with OSM now but subject to third-party IP rights". In the latter case, others could either not edit your data at all (except of course deleting it), or they would at least see some kind of indication in their editor that basically tells them this data is not as free as we'd like it to be, and if they possess enough raw material to replace the data with something fully CT compatible, they should do so.

I am very eager to stop navel-gazing and get a coherent license and license change process in page so that we can start doing innovative things like this which will be of interest to the Open IP world generally. Given the highly granular we work with and contribute data, it will not be easy? Going slightly at a tangent, I would start with GPS traces as test case. It would be great to have the opportunity to choose individually what license we want rather than a begrudging and regularly challenged consensus.  BTW, I had an interesting conversation with Eric Loubier, head of Natural Resources Canada, at SOTM 2010.  He suggested that he would be looking seriously at supporting multi-licensed data as a necessity,  i.e. download users of geodata select what kind of license they can abide by (PD, share-alike, non-commercial, ...) and then are presented with options meeting those criteria.  There are great opportunities for co-operation.

>Bye
>Frederik
>
>-- 
>Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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