[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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