[OSM-legal-talk] answers to bvh

[bvh]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 09:57:10PM -0500, John Wilbanks wrote:
> 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?

It will probably come down to a post on ./ on how entity
such and such is abusing the poor open map project. If the publicity
is played right there is fair change that the violater decides
the PR disaster for his or her company is not worth it anymore.

And actually this has already happened, so I know how such a legal
broeha compiles : most of time the issues get settled. Only very
few GPL cases have actually had to go to court.

And that is the big advantage of using a well recognized share-alike
license. Not because it provides special _legal_ protection, but
because it is easy to sensibilize people around how organisation X
is violating the spirit of the project.

If the project itself uses a PD then it is impossible to
get this net-support.

> 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...

I think we all want to help the good guys. Here is a specific
scenario that I would dislike and that a PD would encourage more
than a share alike license : TomTom taking PD OSM data, converting
it to their DRM laden encrypted devices and prevent users that now
depend on this OSM data the freedom that they took themselves to
free updates. In my scenario the good guy I want to help is the
individual customer of our TomTom.

On the contrary if our data is in some share-alike license then
TomTom as a commercial entity with a lot to loose will get from
their laywers the same advice as everyone else has been getting :
that the legality of our CC-by-AA data is questionable and that
they certainly open themselve to some form of backlash, be it not
of the legal kind than at least of the net-outrage. This makes
life difficult for the closed commercial entity TomTom and opens
opportunities for an open commercial entity to enter the field,
which would help the individual customer the most.

If however OSM
data was PD'd by OSM the advice would be : by all means go ahead
and suck the OSM project dry for what it is worth, lessening the
competitive advantage that an open commercial entity would have.

> 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.

Well, TomTom's laywer will say exactly the same and hence that there
is no guarantee that the court will get things right. With 'right'
for them of course being the position that there is nothing
to copyright in our data.

> 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.

OSM data is clearly no science.

cu bart