[OSM-legal-talk] transitive contracts

[Rob Myers]

John Wilbanks wrote:
> -------
> Gerv says
>  > Why can't contracts make contracts transitive? "You agree that if you
>  >pass this data on to someone else, they need to sign the same
>  > undertaking."
> -------
> 
> Contracts can, indeed, do this. But if one person breaks the chain and 
> posts, then the chain is broken, and the share-alike stops. That's the 
> thing. Share-alike is entirely based on copyright. It doesn't have the 
> magic power in the absence of copyright - that's why it started out 
> being called copyleft and not dataleft.

And this cannot be overstated. If one person creates a tarball of a 
dataset covered by a contract (such as OSM under ODL in the US) and 
uploads it to archive.org, anyone who downloads it is not committing an 
offense. With copyrighted material, they would be breaking copyright.

If OSM were a large corporation they could try to track down the leaker 
and sue them to recover damages from them. But this won't work for OSM 
even if OSM wanted to sue as the desired redress would be the 
restoration of copyleft. This would be impossible, and money wouldn't be 
a substitute.

- Rob.