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

[Mike Collinson]

At 05:16 PM 10/08/2010, Brian Quinion 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.

I believe we are well covered here with the current activities of the Data Working Group and our completed registration under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act [1] . As I think you imply, it is best to at least start by assuming that the Contributor has acted in good faith and simply work with them to sort things out.  Our understanding from legal counsel is that if there is indeed a copyright infringement, we need to 1) have a mechanism in place whereby the copyright owner can contact us (done), have a process to remove data if so required (done), and be seen to do what we say (done - a Lithuanian case acts a reference).


Mike


[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use_-_Discussion_Draft#Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act