[OSM-legal-talk] Is this license acceptable for a source?

[Iván Sánchez Ortega]

El Miércoles, 2 de Abril de 2008, Frédéric Brière escribió:
> I was worried at first about the "one year at a time" clause, but the
> license only appears to grant termination rights to the licensee, and
> not to the city.  (Although my contact seemed to imply otherwise; I will
> inquire about this.)
>
> Does this look kosher?  In particular, would the "all right reserved"
> mention cause any problems?

It looks pretty nice.

The "All rights reserved" may be misleading. They'll be basically weaving all 
rights:

> The  City  hereby  grants  to  the Licensee  a  non- exclusive,  fully  
> paid,  royalty-free  right  and licence  to  exercise  all  Intellectual 
> Property  Rights  in  the  Data.

See? No problem. The same stuff happens with creative commons licenses: the 
author has (by default) all rights reserved; by applying a CC license, he's 
waiving some, or all, I.P. rights.


For me, it seems like a rough CC-by license.


The only peculiar thing is that, when you have to attribute the City, you 
can't say "This data comes from the Ville de Sherbrooke government" 
or "Courtesy Ville de Sherbrooke". You *have* to say "© Ville blah blah blah, 
all rights reserved".

In essence, it's the same as in a CC-by license. With such a license, you have 
to "keep intact all copyright notices for the Work". Theoretically, John Doe 
can publish something with a copyright notice and then put a CC-by license on 
it. The final product would read "© John Doe; licensed under CC-by".



Moreover, depending on the canadian law, there is an easy workaround for this 
license: you're explicitly granted all rights over any modifications of the 
data. In certain jurisdictions, just converting the data to another format is 
a modification. Do the math.


(Disclaimer: IANAL, I'm not an expert on canadian law.)

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Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivansanchez at escomposlinux.org>

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