[OSM-legal-talk] Copyright on layers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 08:24:00AM +0100, Etienne wrote:
> On 7/10/06, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Emil Vaughan" <emil79 at gmail.com>
> >To: <legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
> >Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2006 2:52 PM
> >Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright on layers
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Ultimately, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that either:
> >
> >1) all OSM data should be released as public domain, and then we can all
> >forget about licensing;
> >
> >or
> >
> >2)  have a license similar to CC-BY-SA, but allow specific exclusions
> >where
> >the use of OSM data combined with "something else" does not lead to the
> >"something else" having to released under CC-BY-SA. These specific
> >exclusions would then either
> >
> >i) have to be decided by the OSM Foundation on a case by case basis,
> >dependent upon who was using the data, what way it was being used, and
> >what
> >it was being combined with; and / or
> >
> >ii) examples of specific uses could be given by OSMF which would not
> >require
> >the "something else" having to released under CC-BY-SA.
> 
> 
> There is a third way.  OSM could allow multiple different licenses.  Then
> each contributor can choose which license to publish under and each data
> consumer can select the appropriately licensed data for the use they have in
> mind.
> 
> There are technical obstacles to achieving this - but we are all more
> technically skilled than we are legally skilled.
> 
> At the simplest level we would need a PD layer and a CC-BY-SA layer.  The
> main difficulty would be to provide some method of linkage between the two
> layers and some rules about how to link (eg a PD segment cannot link to a CC
> node, but a CC segment can link to a PD node, etc).

So, can I edit an existing node and make it CC once it's public domain?
What happens when I go through and do that for the hwole dataset? What
if I put it under a CC-By-SA-NC license instead of just By-SA? What if I
go through and edit every node or segment to be public domain?

Having mixed licensing is possible if you want to accept a secondary
*dual* licensing per contributor -- but I do not recommend it in the
same interface for the only license on the data. There are too many
situations where the combination of multi-licensed data into a single
interface lead to problems, in my opinion.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer