[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-dev] Bittorrent

[Francis Davey]

2009/4/19 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

[snip]

>
> But you do drive home the point that any license that counts on an
> unbroken chain of prior acknowledgment of a contract ("I only give you
> this data if you agree to ...") will not work. Violation of such a chain
> has been a theoretical construct until now ("what if someone in China
> simply re-posts the file without restrictions..."), and you make it real.
>

I'm not entirely sure about the context of this discussion (but assume
that the cross-post means it doesn't matter) but the whole point of a
licence is that it operates without there being a chain of covenants.
I may have misunderstood you of course, but that should not be a
problem.

In almost all jurisdictions various information rights are property
rights, which means they operate against everyone. The licence is a
permission to use (say a work) without violation of the rights holders
rights. I.e. the default is total restriction, which may only be
bypassed via the licence. It is irrelevant whether a use of the
information is aware of the licence since it is permissive not
restrictive (although it may be constructed by stating exceptions to a
generally given permission).


--
Francis Davey