[OSM-legal-talk] Progressing OSM to a new dataLicence regime

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Which is why the license also uses contract to help where database
> right is not available.

Yes, but from Jordan's posting, which was quoted immediately after:

>>> --Contract creates a barrier of opportunity and transaction costs
>>> similar to copyright [above]. In addition, it is harder to enforce
>>> against third parties after breach and so offers only limited
>>> protection.

"offers only limited protection". So we're doing all this enormous  
work and forcing people to understand all this license stuff just for  
a little bit of limited protection that will protect uns only against  
the well-meaning.

>> And I may add my pet issue that if someone breaches contract you are
>> likely to be able to sue them for damages at most, which amount to
>> the money you could have earned if the contract had not been
>> breached, which is zero in our case.
>
> I believe that is not true everywhere - in Europe that is generally
> the case but the US allows for punitive damages as well as  
> compensatory
> damages I think.

I don't know. We should find out, because if I am right then  
"contract" is worth nothing to us. (As opposed to commercial providers!)

>> Let us drop all this nonsense and concentrate on drawing up the moral
>> guidelines - saying what we consider ok and what not - instead of
>> fantasizing about having legal powers to enforce anything.
>
> The problem is that we know that if we go down that route we will
> almost certainly loose (a) a lot of contributors and (b) a lot of
> existing data.

I won't be held hostage by them. If it turns out that they're  
clinging to some pipe dream of being able to enforce some uses of the  
data, leading to a situation where the whole project suffers from  
unnecessary complex usage regulations that can and will be ignored by  
anyone with a sufficiently big interest, putting the "honest" users  
at a disadvantage, then I'll rather purge the database of that  
tainted data now than in two years' time.

It is not too late to be honest to these people and say: Look, we've  
given you the illusion of having legal clout in the matter, we've  
given you the illusion of you having a copyright on facts, but it's  
not going to stand up in court anyway so we're dropping this.

Bye
Frederik

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