[OSM-legal-talk] compatibility with CC licenses

[Gustav Foseid]

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 2:10 PM, John Wilbanks
<wilbanks at creativecommons.org>wrote:

> If Big Company decides to run a mechanical turk contest on Amazon to
> extract facts from your DB one at a time, do they violate the license
> without having ever signed it - can they possibly be bound by it if they
> haven't signed it, clicked ok on a digital box etc? And at what point
> does the individual person working in the turk contest infringe - 5
> facts, 10 facts, 100 facts? And who would you sue in the event you
> wanted to take it to court?


A related use case:

A user in the EU downloads the database (planet.osm in OSM), modifies it
(simplifies ways and merges dual carriageways, for instance) and puts this
derived database (planet-modified.osm) on a FTP server, along with a
readme.txt containing the license, in a zip file. Another user in the EU,
downloads this copy, unzips the archive and puts all the files in the zip
archive in a folder on a FTP server. A person in the USA, not related to the
creation or publishing of the database, makes a web page with a direct link
to just the database (planet-modified.osm). Then Small Company CTO downloads
the database from this link, having never seen the license text and working
in a jurisdiction without copyright protection (or related rights) for
databases. Can the CTO use the database in his brand new product without any
restrictions? Who, if any, can the creator of the original database take to
court?

A variation is if all the users are in the US, but Small Company is in the
EU. The Database Directive does not give protection for database creators
outside the EU/EEC (as far as I remember). Same questions.

 - Gustav
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