[OSM-legal-talk] Is CC-BY-SA is compatible with ODbL - a philosophical point

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 22 August 2010 18:44, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
> Move forward a bit and we start to implement the new licence.  Since we
> could not reach consensus on how CC-By-SA applied to "our" data, it seems
> reasonable to assume that we can not assume how CC-BY-SA data applies to
> other people data, and therefor to be safe I presume we won't simply be
> blindly importing  CC-BY-SA data into OSM.  I presume we will be approaching
> providers of data that has a CC-BY-SA licence and asking if we can use that
> data in OSM.  So our permission to use the data will stem not from a
> CC-BY-SA licence, but from the explicit permission given by the copyright
> holder.

That's what I think the plan is.  However it is made very difficult by
the fact that those data providers most likely chose their SA licenses
in order to be able to use any improvements made on top of their data,
which we are planning to very soon make impossible for them.  So we
now approach them and say "Hello, can you please grant all these..
perpetual.. irrevocable.. etc. rights to something called OSMF, and by
the way you won't be able to use OSM data any more because our new
license is not compatible with yours".

I'm in a situation where a lot of the data I uploaded is derived from
a CC-By-SA source.  Unclear as this license is, it surely guarantees
one thing: that the works can be mixed with other equally licensed
works, and the source can feed the improvements made by OSM back into
their database.  And they were doing this often, to the point that we
(well... some of us) were hoping to converge into one database.
Suddenly we are changing the license and will not let them continue
mixing the data.  At the same time we want to ask them a significant
favour.

It's also quite difficult if that source has a couple of 1000s of
contributors, some of them anonymous (though I think the anonymous
editions now become something called "orphaned works" and I don't know
what copyright says about these)

Cheers