[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL Enforcement (Re: OBbL and forks)
James Livingston
doctau at mac.com
Sat Dec 12 02:03:12 GMT 2009
On 12/12/2009, at 3:44 AM, Anthony wrote:
> and the original contributors can't sue for breach of contract or infringement of the database rights, correct? In that sense, this is a lot *like* a copyright assignment. Especially since the ODbL only covers the database as a whole, not the individual contributions.
Which brings us on to enforcement - at some point a user is going to use ODbL licensed data, not comply with the licence, and not respond to asking nicely. Who is going to sue them to enforce the ODbL and for what? I've got six points below, corresponding to copyright, database rights and contract for each of individual contributors and the Licensor (OSMF for data coming from the main db).
1) The Licensor suing for copyright infringement - as OSMF isn't the copyright holder of anything in the database, I doubt they could sue for this.
2) One or more contributors suing for copyright infringement - one of the things that ODbL supposedly fixes is being sued for this by individual contributors, so lets discount it for now.
3) The Licensor suing for infringement of database rights - this (AFAIK) only applies in Europe, so while OSMF may be able to sue, we can't count on it.
4) A contributor suing for infringement of database rights - as I understand it, people's contributions generally won't have any db rights, and it only applies in Europe again.
5) A contributor suing for breach of contract - user don't have a contract with contributors.
6) The Licensor suing for breach of contract - I assume this is what it would have to be.
So if someone uses data from the main OSM db, doesn't follow the terms of the ODbL, OSMF can probbaly sue them for breach of contract. My question (it took a while to get here) is can the OSMF sue for that if the data wasn't directly from them?
The other day I downloaded an Australian extract of a planet dump, and the data travelled OSM -> mirror -> person doing extract -> me. If the data was ODbL'd, who is my contract with? If I agreed to the contract via "clickwrap" "browsewrap", then presumably it would be the person who did the AU extract, so could OSMF sue me if I violated ODbL?
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