[OSM-legal-talk] data release statement

Stefan Baebler stefan.baebler at gmail.com
Wed Jan 21 19:31:25 GMT 2009


Hi!

We, the OSM community in Slovenia are in talks with a local company
GlobalVision [1] that is willing to donate some of their data (mostly
POIs) to the OSM project. And we have some legal questions for you.

If we do accept their data, how can we be sure that they have all the
rights to donate it (as they are claiming and probably also is the
case). We would like to avoid any chance of legal troubles to come
haunting us after some time. Questionable data could easily be removed
(source tag, dedicated import user), but old planets are being mirrored
and distributed so the data would be out there in the wild and cannot be
erased.

In hypothetical worst case scenario, that the true owner is someone else
and comes up to us with this issue we'd need some way to turn them (and
their pack of lawyers) to our source, not us (we'd probably still just
remove the questionable data to avoid further distribution).

Some kind of a statement from the donor could help, but we're not sure
what exactly should it contain.

"The company X is hereby donating the dataset of Y map_features to the
OpenStreetMap project, to be published under CC-BY-SA licence with
attribution to "X" (in source tag of the data). The company X owns the
dataset and has all the rights to make this donation."
(Same in Slovenian and in English)

How was this handled in cases of other such imports (eg. AND data could
be derived from TeleAtlas or an unlicensed paper map). Is there any
legal safety net needed?

Data was checked by several most active members of local OSM community
and we approve the quality. This legal question is the only one bugging
us. Maybe we are just too paranoid and too strictly following the
guidelines[2]? Technical part of the import isn't an issue.

Any thoughts?
Stefan

[1] http://www.globalvision.si
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines




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