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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Mikel Maron wrote:
> This *seems* like a big problem in the ODbL, but maybe I
> misundertand. Is the ODbL non-transitive??

It certainly is planned to be non-transitive.

It feels a bit non-free at first because you will never ever get rid of 
the original licensor; but thinking about it, it's much the same as e.g. 
copyright law in Germany where strictly speaking no PD exists and 
whenever I release something into PD I have to say "I grant a perpetual, 
irrevokable license to anyone to do whatever they please" - the law does 
not allow me to actually relinquish my rights.

> What if another entity, say some National Mapping Agency, licenses
> their data as ODbL? It appears that if the NMA are the sole licensor,
> and the ODbL prevents transfer of the rights of sole licensor, then
> OSM could not assume those rights, and not import the NMA data.

That's a difficult bit. In Matt's Q&A document it says

Q: If Substantial Contributions are licensed to OSMF under the ODbL, 
does that impose any additional restrictions on the use of the OSM 
database or on the operations of the OSMF?

A: Large contributions to the OSMF would come with the right to 
sub-license that data.

So at least Clark's view is that to incorporate something else that is 
ODbL licensed into OSM, we would have to ask the rights owner to grant 
us extra permission to sub-license the data because ODbL alone is not 
enough for that. (Very different from CC-BY-SA where we could just take 
it, attribute him, and that's it.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"