[OSM-legal-talk] OBbL and forks

James Livingston doctau at mac.com
Sat Dec 12 01:42:38 GMT 2009


On 12/12/2009, at 7:07 AM, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> But if the foundation wants to have copyright in the data I think
> it's trivial for it to have some by doing *some* of the maintenance
> edits on behalf of the foundation or one person (or more) transferring
> their rights instead of everyone doing this.

One of the claimed problems with CC-BY-SA was that users were worried that they could be sued by any contributor for copyright infringement.

Aside from any "can the data have copyright rights" questions, if OSMF was to claim some copyright in the data then they're basically implying that other contributors do too, and anyone of us could sue users. Which I don't think is what they want.


> Out of curiosity, could the license at all work if contributors didn't
> have to assign copyright *nor* database rights?  Apart from the fact
> that updating the license would require a new vote (or licensing under
> ODbL v1+, similar to GPLv2+), but could that be done?

As I understand it, contributors don't have to (and aren't being asked to) assign either of those rights in the "exclusive transfer" sense. We're giving OSMF non-exclusive permission to distribute our contributions under ODbL (and future licenses, etc.).




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