[OSM-legal-talk] Contributo terms (was : decision removing data:

[David Groom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Smith" <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>
To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." <legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data


[snip]
> The reason for the data loss is as Frederik wrote, CC-by-SA isn't
> believed to be compatible with ODBL, and almost nothing except CC0 and
> PD data is compatible with the new contributor terms,


personally I'm still waiting for a reply to the question I asked on this 
list on 20 July entitled "Query over Contributor Terms".

To avoid you having to do back and look, the point I was asking is as 
follows:

The last line of paragraph 1 of the contributors terms states "....You have 
explicit permission from the rights holder to submit the Contents.....".  It 
is the use of the word "explicit" worries me.   The sentence in which that 
phrase is contained would still make sense if the word "explicit" were 
removed.  Therefore I conclude that the inclusion of the word explicit is 
important and deliberate.

To me the phrase "explicit permission" would indicate that the rights holder 
would have to state something along the lines of  "I give David Groom 
permission to incorporate my data into OpenSteetMap" .

Now John Smith in his statement above says "almost nothing except CC0 and PD 
data is compatible with the new contributor terms". Lets take CC0 data, 
there is still a rights holder of the data, who has released the data under 
CC0.  I would contend I have an IMPLICIT permission, to use the data in OSM, 
I would also contend I have "permission" to use the data in OSM, what I am 
unsure about is that I have "EXPLICIT permission".

At the moment I remain to be convinced I have "EXPLICIT permission", no one 
has tried to argue otherwise, and so currently I would find myself in the 
position of being unable to agree something along the lines of the CT terms 
which new users are asked to sign up to, to cover edits I have already made.

Note that I believe the same argument could be made for PD data, as 
technically there is still a rights holder, who released the data into PD.

Please believe me when I say I'm not trying to be difficult, just that the 
inclusion of the word "explicit" in the CT obviously is deliberate, in that 
the sentence still works without it, so its inclusion must be there for a 
reason.

David