[OSM-legal-talk] Contradictory Contributor Terms?

[Robert Whittaker (OSM)]

47, 80n <80n80n at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Simon Biber <simonbiber at yahoo.com.au>
> wrote:
>> Item 1, First sentence: "You agree to only add Contents for which You are
>> the copyright holder ..."
>>
>> Item 1, Last sentence: "If You are not the copyright holder of the
>> Contents, You represent and  warrant that ..."
>
> Simon, if you are creating a new account this means that you cannot upload
> any content that is not yours and you cannot upload any content that you
> might have derived from a souce for which you do not have *explicit*
> permission.
>
> If you are upgrading[1] your account from CC-BY-SA to ODbL+DbCL+CT then you
> can only do so if you have never already uploaded content which is not
> yours.  You cannot give OSMF rights to your content which you do not have
> yourself.

I don't think that's quite what he was asking. The intent of the
clause seems fairly clear to me (as you've explained), but the problem
is that the first sentence says "You cannot do X" and then a later one
says "If you do X then...". (Here X is uploading stuff for which
you're not the copyright holder.)

The intent is clearly that you should be able to do X under certain
conditions (ie having explicit permission if you're not the copyright
holder), but by a strict reading of clause you are not permitted to.
The first sentence explicitly says you cannot do X, and nothing in the
later "If X then ..." part actually guarantees that the "if" part has
to be able to occur. The "If X then ..." part is thus entirely
redundant.

To have what I assume is the desired effect the clause IMO needs to be
rewritten. I guess it should be structured as two sub-clauses: The
first detailing the requirements for uploaded data for which you are
the copyright holder, and the second for data for which you are not.

Robert.

(For the avoidance of doubt here, I'm assuming that it's possible for
a third party to give "explicit permission" for a mapper to add data
owned by the third party to OSM under the new CTs without the mapper
becoming the copyright holder for that data, and that the intent of
the clause is to allow mappers to add such data to OSM.)

-- 
Robert Whittaker