[OSM-legal-talk] License Change - moving forward

[Richard Weait]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Brian Quinion
<openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Mike Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz> wrote:
>> If you support the share-alike concept, I urge you to accept the new Contributor Terms which provides for a coherent Attribution, Share-Alike license written especially for databases.  If you are a Public Domain license supporter, we are divided as a community on which is best and I do urge you to give this one a good try.  The Contributor Terms is expressly written to allow us to come back in future years and see what is best  without all this fuss about procedure.  And if you'd just really like all this hoo-haa to go away and get back to mapping, well, please say yes.
>
> One question:
>
> Given that you can't (legitimately) sign up to the CT if you have used
> data which you are not the copyright owner how will we deal with the
> situation where someone who HAS imported external data signs up to the
> Contributor Terms?
>
> In some ways it is their own problem, they have warranted that they
> are the legal owner and accepted responsibility for any resulting
> copyright infringement but this seems a trifle unfair since they may
> not have understood the implications and it also still leaves OSMF to
> resolve the future copyright disputes.

If you have derived data from a source that allows deriving to OSM
then I'd say you are fine.  This would cover tracing from aerial
imagery.  If we were dealing with the world of copyright and creative
works this would be similar to taking a photograph of a bonsai plant
after being granted permission to take the photograph.

If you've imported data from a source that allows importation to OSM,
again I'd say that you are okay.

If you've imported data from a source based only on "license
compatibility" in the last three years you'd have to have been
uninformed or thoughtless to do it without giving the license upgrade
some consideration as stated in the import guidelines since January
2008.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines

It would probably be pretty embarrassing for anybody who made that
sort of error in judgment or declaration of ignorance, so they might
be a little prickly about the subject or try to make it seem like
someone else's fault rather than admitting their error.