[OSM-legal-talk] transitive contracts
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Wed Feb 20 19:37:49 GMT 2008
Hi,
> It's not just about the
> uses you envision today. It's about 10 years down the line, 20 years
> down the line. Strategies built on strong copyrights and IPRs have a
> long lifetime, and a lot of unintended consequences.
Hm. Suppose we used a restrictive copyleft license lice the ODL, but at
the same time said that 12 months after being last edited, we release
stuff into the public domain.
Assuming for a moment that ODL works, that would effectively minimize
the risk that many are talking of - "capture" by some evil entity. Of
course they could take our data and put it into their DRMed TomToms or
whatever, but it would be a year old, and a year is a lot. It would
still be sufficient for some customers but you couldn't ever grab a
market share with that. In contrast, well-behaving non-DRM competitor
would be able to offer free daily updates, reflecting the current world
and not the world as it was a year ago.
Such a scenario would ensure that all our data is ultimately PD, which I
consider a good thing, and would still make relatively sure that the
project cannot be hijacked by someone.
Year-old data would probably be sufficient for many uses where ODL would
be too restrictive (combining our data with other data that you're not
allowed to publish etc), at least it would be so a few years down the line.
Maybe we can find a compromise along these lines. The "PD delay" has
been discussed before but people have talked of 15 or 20 years or so,
and that would be too long to still be usable after that; 20 year old
road data is probably more suitable for historic research than for
anything of current interest. But if we could agree on something like
one year, could that not give us the best of both worlds?
Bye
Frederik
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