[OSM-legal-talk] Progressing OSM to a new data Licence regime

[Tom Hughes]

In message <20080204144752.f1eq9iook8csk40c at webmail.systemed.net>
        Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:

> Tom Evans wrote:
>> If we're going to do this anyway, can we not allow users to mark  
>> their preference as public domain too?  It seems a significant  
>> number of OSM participants may be perfectly happy to have their data  
>> given away PD, and storing an option per user would make this  
>> possible.  We're going to do that work of asking each user anyway,  
>> so why not let each user mark themselves as
>> one of:
>>
>> a) Public Domain
>> b) Open Database License
>> c) CC by SA (the default now)
>
> Thus far everyone who signs up to the project has already agreed to  
> CC-BY-SA. We don't believe it's a viable option for data licensing  
> going forward so would not seek to offer it as a choice.
>
> The idea of storing an optional 'PD?' preference per user is an  
> interesting one and we'd welcome feedback as to whether there'd be the  
> demand for this. Effectively this would be requesting that OSMF, or  
> anyone else, creates a public domain database from your contributions.

One problem with this idea goes back to David's question about
edit history - if we had a per-user PD flag then only objects which
had never been touched by somebody without that flag set could be
included in any PD data set (modulo the whole question of whether
any edits by such people were "significant" which would be hard to
determine automatically).

> Tim (chippy) wrote (and TomH followed up similarly):
>> If I distribute web mapping of my special company data and OSM, I  
>> don't have to give my data back to OSM, right? In other words,  
>> there's no requirement to distribute, but also, if the map images  
>> are distributed, then it doesn't have to be under the same licence.
>>
>> If I zip up the shapefiles used, and put them on my server for folks  
>> to download, then these would come under the same licence and be  
>> able for OSM to benefit from them?
>>
>> How about putting my propriety data and OSM together locked within  
>> an in-car sat nav system. Would this be classed as distribution of  
>> the database? What should my company do in this case?
>
> These should be answered at the "differences" page at
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Open_Data_License
> (which wasn't originally linked from the FAQ - apologies)
>
> First case: if the work is derivative then you do have to give your  
> data back. We are asking the licence authors to add a further  
> provision to make it explicit that the data has to be contributed  
> back. This is probably the aspect of the licence over which we've had  
> most discussions and we are determined to get it right.

I think the concept of an explicit requirement to hand back data
is the part of this plan that I gave most concerns about - it was
certainly far and away the most problematic clause of the original
Mozilla license I think, and the whole idea seems to have largely
vanished since then in most open licenses.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/