[OSM-legal-talk] moving up the stack

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

>> [Tom:]
>> OSM will undoubtedly make some business models less profitable or  
>> even
>> redundant. But I don't foresee us having any trouble gathering the  
>> data, and
>> there are/will be plenty of ways to finance further use whether it's
>> producing walking guides or route planning web sites. Cheap and  
>> unfettered
>> access will also help social/financial entrepreneurs innovate in  
>> unexpected
>> ways - I have lots of ideas up my sleeve if only I had the time!
>
>> [Steve, replying to Frederik:]
>> Your hypothetical student is a poor entrepreneur. He would never have
>> started Red Hat.
>
> And I can see where you're both coming from.
>
> But it upsets me, a lot, that OSM has no interest in being friendly to
> some business models,

It seems to be pretty much dependent on how much you want to change  
the world and how little you are willing to play by current rules (or  
better: established procedures).

If you always play 100% by current rules you'll never change the  
world. If your desire to change the world is too strong then you  
might have trouble getting anything done (i.e. if your aiming for a  
domain of freedom that encompasses everything causes you to reject  
property altogether, leaving you without a GPS to record your  
tracks ;-).

People like myself and probably Richard want to change the  
established model of proprietary geodata (throwing quite a challenge  
to current commercial geodata providers); but we do not necessarily  
want to overthrow copyright altogether. So for us it is ok if someone  
made something copyrighted from free geodata.

Others aim further, and aim for a world in which a large culture of  
free information/data/software rivals and outgrows an ever shrinking  
amount of "yesterday's copyrighted stuff", and in which business  
models have changed to adapt to this new culture by providing  
services instead of selling licenses. This line of thought keeps  
copylefted work much more separate; it is difficult to mix with  
commercial products, and would probably spawn its own way of how  
atlases are created and distributed rather than challenging anyone  
who is in the atlas business now. (While being a long-term threat to  
commercial geodata providers, they can afford to ignore these efforts  
in the short term, knowing that for their customer base the open data  
is not an alternative.)

I can see the point and would probably find such a society  
attractive, however I am not idealistic enough to be prepared to make  
lots of sacrifces for a possible future better world order. Maybe  
"selfish" is the world ;-)

Getting back to the legal discussion. Maybe many things can actually  
be fixed by properly defining what a derived work is and what it is  
not, using the destinction of whether something is "built on" OSM  
data or just "uses" OSM data, much like GPL <-> LGPL.

A complex project, like a big atlas, might consist of two parts:  
Someone first takes OSM data and improves it, creating an  
intermediate work that is "built on" OSM data. While still in favour  
of PD, I could live with our forcing him to give this intermediate  
work back to the public. After that, he uses his cartographer skills  
to paint an atlas that "uses" OSM data, and we'd define that this is  
not a derived work and let him copyright it (with proper attribution  
if need be).

In that direction we might achieve what some people called a "data  
share-alike" license, and all by defining what we deem "derived".  
We'd be able to keep CC-BY-SA, enable the kind of small-scale  
commercial operations along established paths that I never tire to  
mention, and provide a lot of legal clarity for our users.

Of course this is just a sketch and would need to be thoroughly  
thought out. Especially as the "intermediate product" I am talking  
about is not normally published and thus would not be subject to SA.

Bye
Frederik

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