[Legal-general] Do we need an extra server at all...?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    Nic, you're a bit too fast for my liking. Is it even clear that we 
need to set up our own server?

Let me explain.

An estimated 80% of data currently in OSM *is* public domain. You can 
extract entire US towns from OSM and not have a single share-alike 
licensed data object in there (unless Dave Hansen claims to have 
acquired a copyright on TIGER data by his import process which I don't 
think he does).

The situation looks less good in Europe, but more people do join the "my 
contributions are PD" bandwagon and you could extract these 
contributions under PD as well. The cool thing is that this works even 
retroactively; if you convince someone to go PD then all his past 
contributions will be opened up in an instant.

It has long since been a good tradition in OSM to try and make everyone 
happy: Instead of forcing people to agree on a fixed schema, we allow 
everyone to do as they please and try to work with what we get. This 
works surprisingly well (mostly).

If we could, therefore, somehow manage to turn OSM into a geodata 
distribution platform where the individual contributors can control the 
licensing, then that would be great for everyone. Some put PD data in, 
some share-alike; some retrieve PD, some retrieve share-alike.

This is not trivial but contrary to what some may say and think, OSM is 
already halfway there, because all of us are firmly of the opinion that 
the holder of the rights to the data is always the individual and not 
the project. That means that there is at least theoretical room for 
multiple licenses on the data.

There are three dangers to this multi-licensed world:

1. Data is "lost" to the PD sphere if a non-PD user touches it. A US 
city you could download today as PD might suddenly have vanished 
tomorrow because a team of non-PD mappers has fixed the data. 
(Similarly, non-PD data can never become PD and there might have to be 
some double data keeping.)

2. Some people could claim that even if a certain node has only ever 
been touched by a PD user, it may still be affected by a "viral 
spillover" of adjacent nodes (see Wiki discussion "whose node is it 
anyway", can't find it right now but the reasoning went that you could 
only put your PD postbox there because I had put the road before).

3. The new license could somehow, on purpose or inadvertently, mandate 
that even if you extract a large amount of PD data from the OSM database 
it would not be PD anymore.

I think we should work towards mastering these risks, and keep the PD 
world as an integral part of OSM. I think this will only strengthen our 
position; ultimately, I would imagine having some kind of flag you can 
set with your API request - "I want the share-alike data" vs. "I want 
this as PD". Users as well as contributors could move between the worlds 
with the switch of a button.

Item 1 from above can probably be fixed by having very good history 
support, so that you can basically request something like "give me the 
most recent version of each of these objects which is still PD" - in the 
worst case, the share-alike version of something will be more current 
and/or more precise but there will always be some PD basis. Care has to 
be taken of course if a PD user intends to remove share-alike licensed 
data and replace it with his own PD data; this must only happen if no 
loss of quality ensues otherwise the share-alike people will, 
understandably, be pissed off.

Item 2 is more of a political thing; I'm very interested in how these 
things will be handled in the license switch-over ahead. I assume that 
there will be *some* rules that govern which data can be transferred to 
the new license even without explicit consent of everybody who ever 
modified that data. If there are such rules, then these will work for PD 
as well - anything that can be transferred from CC-BY-SA to X without 
the user's consent must, legally, be declared to not fall under 
copyright and thus it can also be transferred to PD...

Item 3 is something where we should ideally have someone with legal 
expertise look at the situation. Unfortunately we are not in the 
strongest position in the project politically but I believe that it 
should be possible to fix such problems should they occur in the new 
license.


I think that an outright "PD split" at this time would not gain us a 
lot, even if it would of course boil the large social issue I have 
sketched here down to a purely technical issue which most of us are more 
comfortable to deal with.

Bye
Frederik

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