[OSM-legal-talk] New license status

[Matt Amos]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> James Livingston wrote:
>> On 28/09/2009, at 11:16 PM, Gustav Foseid wrote:
>>> Well... There is no copyright that expires after 15 years. Sui
>>> generis database rights expire after 15 years, but copyright is
>>> hardly very relevant for an OpenStreetMap database dump.
>>
>> In Europe maybe - however there are countries where database do have
>> inherent copyright separate from the copyright over their contents,
>> for example in Australia. I think the copyright wouldn't expire for 70
>> years here, which is definitely more than the 15 for European sui
>> generis database rights.
>
> I think we should try very hard to make conditions the same for all OSM
> users on the planet, as far as possible. If what you say is true then we
> should make sure (via the content license) that the content is not
> protected longer in Australia than anywhere else.

interesting. we should make sure that ODC are aware of this for the
next version of ODbL. (note that the contents license != database
license, though. individual contents and "substantial extracts" of the
database are licensed separately).

> Personally, as I am opposed to us trying to dictate to our users what
> they may and may not do with our data, I would appreciate to see OSM
> data go out of copyright as quickly as possible. (I once tried to talk
> our share-alike hardliners into accepting one year, on the grounds of
> one-year-old OSM data being practically useless... but they wouldn't
> have it.)

hi, i'm matt and i'm a PD heretic ;-)

cheers,

matt