[OSM-legal-talk] ODBL enforcement: contract law and remedies

[Ed Avis]

Frederik Ramm <frederik at ...> writes:

>Indeed, there are in fact people who have gone on record saying they 
>will stop contributing, and remove their previous contributions, if OSM 
>were to become a PD project.

But presumably nobody who will stop contributing if OSM continues to be
licensed under Creative Commons share-alike terms?

>>Again, is there any evidence (rather than just repetition of the same
>>opinions) that in some country, OSM data is effectively in the public domain?
>
>If your question is: "Has anybody ever used OSM data without regard to 
>the CC-BY-SA license, been sued, and lost" then the answer is, to my 
>knowledge, no.

That would be needed to prove that CC-BY-SA is effective in some country.
But I feel that the burden of proof is the other way around.  If you suggest
dropping the existing licence and moving to a much more complicated new one,
you need to show good evidence that the current licence is not working.
When I look around I see a thriving OSM project, with no evidence that the
current CC-BY-SA licence has held back people from contributing or led to
leechers distributing their own OSM-derived data under unfree terms.
(That said, there are some cases where the ODBL is more permissive, since AFAIK
it allows rendered map images to be distributed under the terms you want.)

>The contract approach is primarily there because many believe the US to 
>be such a country.

That might be so, but again, I really doubt you can copy maps with impunity,
otherwise we would be copying street names from Google.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>