[OSM-legal-talk] answers to bvh
John Wilbanks
wilbanks at creativecommons.org
Wed Feb 20 02:57:10 GMT 2008
I'm going to answer two at once here.
And I'm not questioning anyone's motivations - I think this debate is at
the heart of a good group of people, trying to find a solution that fits
their goals, in an uncertain space and without a lot of clear guidance.
I hope everyone involved can take a deep breath and realize that the
battles inside a group of people with similar beliefs can be the hardest
sometimes.
The law at this stage is like uncompiled code when it comes to data -
when it goes to court, that is when you find out whether it runs or not.
I just happen to be convinced that the code is likely to compile in a
certain way.
jtw
-----
from bvh:
Common, this is insulting : OSM as a project has never gone
after violators, let alone engaged in the obsessive behaviour that
you describe. To paint us as would be RIAA-ist who want to engage in
serial litigation goes so counter your measured approach in the first
part of your email that I wonder if it is written by the same person.
------
from me (JTW): Apologies, I am not implying this is an OSM position.
I've found this community remarkably civil. Even the private emails I've
gotten from my post are civil :-)
But in the whole concept of a share-alike license, the idea is to compel
behavior. If you're not going to think about enforcement, why compel?
That is part and parcel of the strategy and it needs to be
explicit...what will you do if you adopt the share-alike approach and
someone violates?
I also think it's very proper to think about rewarding the people who
play nice. If you've ever been on pirate bay, you know that the bad guys
tend to do whatever they want, and the good guys don't always win. I'd
rather set up systems that recognize the legal reality and reward the
good guys for being good. Any system based on restrictions or
enforcement will someday have to deal with enforcement...
you also make some very interesting arguments about the copyrightability
of your database, which I think would be the kind of thing that gets
figured out in court. It's just that my experience hasn't trained me to
expect the courts to get things right, and that there is a lot of
background as to why I could extract the underlying data from the OSM
project without touching the arrangement - and that makes my position as
a pirate reposter pretty strong.
------
from bvh:
Strange then that the position of Creative Commons is that there
is no effective copyright... If it is such a clear cut case as
Creative Commons maintains, then where do the insecurities come from?
------
from me (JTW) This is a great question. In my experience, this comes
from general counsels freaked out about risk - an institution tends to
prefer avoiding all risk when possible, and the risk that the CC
position is found wrong is enough to stop participation. this is
embodied in the data protocol, where we talk about the difficulty in
figuring out where copyright starts and stops.
when it comes to science, my position is that it's better to default to
the side of the public domain, to create zones of certainty. again, YMMV.
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