[OSM-legal-talk] Q&A with a lawyer

[Peter Miller]

On 11 May 2009, at 23:43, Matt Amos wrote:

> the OSMF LWG recently had a couple of calls with Clark Asay, who has
> generously agreed to give OSMF legal advice concerning the new
> license. i've attached the write up of the first of the calls, in
> which we went over a series of short questions that grant and i had
> previously extracted from ulf's compendium of use cases and open
> issues.
>
> clark had lots of useful thoughts which are well worth reading and
> discussing here. the most important issues are highlighted in yellow,
> some of which require community input to resolve.
>
> we had the second call earlier today and we'll be writing up the
> results of that real soon now.
>

Very useful Matt.

I have just concluded an email discussion with Jordan following our  
lawyers review of 1.0 who has answered some points but is now saying  
that he would need someone to pay him to answer more of them which  
leaves things in a rather unsatisfactory state given that I am not  
prepared to pay two lawyers to talk to each other! We have not had any  
response to the review from the OSMF council to date.

So... could you help me with a couple of the points raised by our  
lawyer at your next Q and A?
The review of 0.9 is here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ITO_World/ODbL_Licence_0.9_legal_review_for_ITO


I am particularly interested in a view of the following:

Regarding point  3 could someone confirm that the Factual Information  
License has now been dumped in favour of the 'Database Contents  
License'? This is implied by the latest release candidate but hasn't  
been discussed on the list to my knowledge. It seems a lot more  
applicable but our lawyer hasn't reviewed it.

Point 9 - Governing Law - Lets assume someone in China creates a new  
work based on OSM and claims from Chinese law that it is not a  
substantial extract. That is then used by someone in Vietnam to  
combine it would something else and manipulate it which makes it more  
like the original OSM DB and then someone in the UK uses that DB. Can  
one procecute the final UK company using UK law or would one need to  
travel to Vietnam and China to do this given that some of the  
interpretations happened under their law?

Point 13. Our lawyer states that the OSMF could change the license as  
they see fit at any time, and of they can then so can anyone else who  
publishes a derivative DB as far as I can see which would be alarming.  
Can you ask who can change the license and by how much. Our lawyer  
writes: "Clauses 3.3 & 9.3 – The OSMF reserves the right to release  
the Database under different terms. It is not the current intention of  
the parties to permit exclusive use of the Database to any single  
person. However, this provision would permit the OSMF to withdraw the  
share alike and free access nature of the Database and even to sell it  
on commercial and exclusive terms. Likewise the OSMF expressly  
reserves the right to “stop distributing or making available the  
Database.”"


Thanks,



Peter


> cheers,
>
> matt
> < 
> Q_A_Session_with_Clark_Asay 
> .pdf>_______________________________________________
> legal-talk mailing list
> legal-talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk