[OSM-legal-talk] Please enable commercial use
Nathan Vander Wilt
nate-lists at calftrail.com
Wed May 7 16:33:06 BST 2008
On May 7, 2008, at 1:24 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> If there were clear Community Norms I could follow as far as
>> Attribution and Share Alike, backed by a license that said "we've
>> tried our hardest to dedicate all these facts back into the public
>> domain" (ie http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/)
>> , I would feel covered enough both ethically and legally to use the
>> data without fear of reprisal.
>
> Why would you not feel covered ethically and legally if you followed
> the
> terms, as written, of the proposed new licensing scheme?
I would not feel so worried ethically under the new license, as it is
fairly clear on a number of things that DON'T result in derived works
(combining with other map layers, the software that uses it).
Especially if OSM could provide something like the PDDL's Community
Norms (though the license would have the final say legally) that
outline what kind of attribution (Notice) is expected in enough common
scenarios.
>
>> The main ambiguity is "who am I and my customers liable to?", that
>> is:
>> does each contributor reserve the right to determine things like
>> whether the license notice was "reasonably calculated" enough to make
>> users aware, or whether a greatly abbreviate form of such notices is
>> acceptable in certain circumstances (eg on a printout), what
>> constitutes a substantial extraction or derivative.
>
> Do you really think the first action of someone aggrieved over this
> would be to sue you?
You are right, I think I'd worked myself into an overly paranoid mood
over the the ambiguities of the current license and the supposed
futility of keeping anything public domain inside the OSM project. For
the uses I imagine me personally or my company needing to make of the
data, the proposed license pair only makes us do pretty much what we'd
have wanted to do anyway (give credit where it's due and keep the data
itself free).
I still hope the Foundation and the community will consider the PDDL/
Community Norms license/guidelines suggested by the Science Commons
instead. While I will happily use (and even continue my small
contributions to) the OSM data under the proposed license pair, I
still find it sad that we feel the need to play the same Intellectual
Property bludgeoning game as our closed competitors, at the expense of
our many public domain contributors.
Anyway, thanks all for sharing, you've helped me narrow down what my
issues are with the license(s). As it seems they are in the end mostly
ideological rather than practical, I think it's time for me to get
back to coding instead of contending.
thanks,
-natevw
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