[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL Enforcement (Re: OBbL and forks)

[Anthony]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:03 PM, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

The ODbL doesn't cover the database contents.  Open Data Commons recommends
using the Database Contents License (which I believe is essentially PD/CC0)
for that.  However, so far no one has answered my repeated questions as to
whether or not this is going to be used by OSM.  If not, in jurisdictions
where geodata is copyrightable (especially "sweat-of-the-brow"
jurisdictions), contributors would retain "all rights reserved".

So, that's still an open question.  Which so far no one seems to have
addressed.


> 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?
>

They could try, but if you've never used an OSMF website (since the license
change), I don't see how they could win.  And even if they did win, at least
if your jurisdiction is anything like it is here in Florida, they'd be able
to get a judgment for actual damages.  Which, since you didn't even touch
their server in the first place, is probably not that much.  Then, if they
get that far, they get to have fun trying to collect that judgment.

In the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, breach of contract is non-criminal.
In fact, it's not even tortious.  There are no injunctions, no statutory
damages, and no punitive damages.  Read Jacobsen v. Katzer, and then scratch
your head wonder why anyone would intentionally try to have a copyleft
license governed under contract law rather than copyright law.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/attachments/20091211/e2ad09fe/attachment.html>