[OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Wed Aug 4 12:43:49 BST 2010


80n wrote:
> How are way splits handled (only one half of the way will have a full
> history)?

This isn't an answer to that particular question: but on a broader level,
it's important for people to realise that this cannot be, and should not be,
a nice tidy binary process where you have "this element is unambiguously
ODbL-ready" or "this element is unambiguously CC-BY-SA only".

Not all contributions are substantial enough to merit copyright. In the
extreme case, if xybot's author did not relicence, then the "simple
inheritance chain" model would rule out vast swathes of data subjected to
xybot's own particular brand of (ahem) enlightenment. But, in fact, changing
"hiighway" to "highway" on 5000 objects is not qualitatively substantial, or
creative, or whatever criterion you want to apply. Even the strictest
sweat-of-the-brow test wouldn't apply to an automated find and replace like
that.

There are going to be thousands of cases like this and I hope we won't get
too anal about them (in either the original, or the IANAL sense). If you
(Etienne) have split a road in Oxfordshire which I originally drew, and half
of the road history has consequently been lost - but your contribution isn't
substantial enough to earn any rights - then I'm not going to throw my dummy
out of the pram and say "these evil guys are preventing me from doing what I
want with the data I created". What matters is that it's fair in the round;
that no-one is significantly disadvantaged either way, even if there's a bit
of to-and-froing at the edges.

cheers
Richard
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