[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL for the DB; what about the contents?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    let's try to sort this out, I think I still not get your point fully.

Simon Ward wrote:
> I’m about creating a world map that’s free for the world and remains
> free for the world.

I'll recap the typical concept behind that: If our database were PD then 
it would be free but it would not be sure to *remain* free because it 
could be incorporated into something proprietary which is much better 
than us, people would flock to the proprietary thing and OSM would be 
dead. Right?

Google Map Maker being a good example: If we were PD, they could just 
load all our stuff to have a nice basis and then simply outrun us in 
terms of marketing, numbers of users, and so on.

This is not a fear I share but I am willing to accept that others have 
it and that the license should cater to it.

The proposed license, even with "facts are free" component, does 
safeguard our project against such a takeover because, by definition, 
you could only really do it by extracting a *substantial* amount of data.

(We have already, months ago, spoken about what happens if someone 
should crowdsource the process, doing one million non-substantial 
extracts and re-combining them to form a substantial extract. We all 
agreed that this would clearly then trigger the share-alike clause.)

So if we allow the extraction of non-substantial amounts of data without 
a share-alike license, e.g. we allow the OS to take five post boxes and 
put them on a Land Ranger map without requesting the Land Ranger map to 
fall under our license, then this does not in any way endanger the 
freedom of our data (the post boxes are still available from OSM). OSM 
could only be endangered by someone capturing us wholesale which simply 
cannot be done with a non-substantial extract.

So anything you contribute to OSM is free and will remain free, even if 
others can also use it in a non-free context.

>> In my eyes what you're proposing would not even work. The whole idea 
>> behind the new license is that if you make some kind of artistic work or 
>> so based on OSM data, you can have full copyright with any license you 
>> want on the resulting work, you only have to share-alike the data base 
>> behind it.
> 
> The database only covers extraction of a substantial proportion.  I
> think any of the data should be covered.  A factual share-alike licence
> can help enforce this.

So what you're saying is basically:

1. You want full share-alike on every tiniest bit of information, 
claiming that you (or the contributor) has intellectual property rights 
to every bit.

2. You waive this share-alike provision for derived works if the 
underlying database is shared (the T-Shirt designer can own his design 
if he shares the underlying database, or if he has used OSM data 
unaltered anyway).

Is that correct?

In my eyes a lot of the elegance of the proposed new license lies in the 
acknowledgment that facts are free anyway. To me, the existing license 
has something un-ethical about it in claiming to have intellectual 
property where none may exist.

I have written about that on this list about 1.5 years ago, and I still 
find the "Science Commons" quote in that article valid:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2007-April/000302.html

You are now going down the very same road again: Let's just *claim* we 
have intellectial property of every tiniest bit of information, and if 
someone believes otherwise let them challenge us. I think this is not 
the right thing to do, especially as we actually strive to make our data 
as factual as possible (i.e. anything not factual in our data is 
probably something we would like to fix if given the means).

Bye
Frederik