[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Foundation Elections - Challenge the Candidates

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

>    Last time I looked the Creative Commons licenses did not have the
>    following clause:
> 
>    "You can use a CC-BY-SA licensed work under any license of your choosing,
>    as long as you can't contact the license holder".

Most jurisdictions will have rules that allow you to use someone's
work if you have made reasonable effort to contact him and failed,
however (a) "I emailed him and he didn't respond" will not count as
reasonable effort, and (b) the burden of proof will be on you, and
that means a lot of work and cost, so we most certainly won't do that
- we just delete the stuff and re-do it in an afternoon.

If we change our license (and I believe we must unless the currently
running legal consultations show us good ways to re-interpret CC) then
we'll have to either delete data created by those who haven't
consented, or move it to a special other-license-database where it can
be retrieved by special "if you know what you're doing" tools.

Any license change, however unanimous, will cause the loss of data
simply because some people cannot be reached. (That's one more reason
to sign up for Public Domain - see Wiki - because if people have done
that we don't lose their data even if we cannot contact them.)

We're growing exponentially, so losing data is not too bad - it will
be recreated in a short time. 

Deleting data from authors who cannot be reached or do not
license their data under a new license will be a difficult proces,
especially where objects have been touched by multiple people. Such
border cases will increase proportionally over time, so if we have to
lose data it would be best to do it as soon as possible.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'