[OSM-legal-talk] Is CC-BY-SA is compatible with ODbL?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Kevin Peat wrote:
> It seems to me that use of these licenses by governments started 
> about the time osm decided they were no good and continues to 
> accelerate. I also find it very odd that this project with extremely 
> limited legal resources feels like it knows better than the large 
> legal teams that governments and state bodies have.

No. 

Firstly, OSMF did not write ODbL; lawyers did (not OSM's lawyers, either).
OSMF did not commission or write studies such as Charlotte Waelde's into the
applicability of copyright to factual data. It's not a case of OSM alone
knowing better.

Secondly, OSM aims to have a licence that is valid, as far as possible, in
all jurisdictions. The Australian Government is perfectly at liberty to
choose a licence that works under the Australian legal system (the recent
case law in Australia may or may not put that into question). But that
doesn't mean it protects OSM data of the USA under US law, or OSM data of
Western Samoa under Western Samoan law, and so on.

Thirdly, in the two cases under most discussion: the Australian Government
has released a _lot_ of material under CC licences, of which data is only
part. As Francis says, "there may be institutional reasons for it". The
British Government has expressly not chosen CC-BY, it has chosen its own
licence of copyright and database rights with an explicit compatibility
clause for CC-BY. (FWIW I had a conversation last year with someone involved
in the OpenData release who confirmed that they did _not_ consider the CC
licences sufficient.)

Above all: "Creative Commons does not recommend using Creative Commons
licenses for informational databases, such as educational or scientific
databases." That's a quote from Creative Commons. To that end, even the
newest CC licences expressly only protect "a compilation of data to the
extent it is protected as a copyrightable work".

cheers
Richard
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