[OSM-legal-talk] Future relicensing in the contributor terms and data imports

[David Dean]

Hi everyone,

I'm a little worried about the impact of the Contributor Terms have on
the ability of OpenStreetMap users to import data. The Contributor
Terms don't explicitly mention importing at all, and seem to be
focused on the user-as-mapper rather than the user-as-data-importer.

I'm concerned that even if a user-as-data-importer agrees to the CTs
under the assumption that it is compatible with, for example, CC-BY
data, then that data could become a noose around OSM neck if we want
to perform a future relicensing (such as Mike's recent example about
relicensing to release 10+ year old data under CC0 - this wouldn't be
possible if any of the old data is CC-BY).

Any significant future relicensing is going to find some data imports
that, regardless of their importers agreement to the CTs, is not going
to be compatible with the hypothetical future license.

I'm not completely sure of the best way to deal with this, but it
seems that two possible approaches come to mind.

1) Don't allow any imports from data that aren't completely compatible
with the CTs (which would most likely just be explicit licensing under
the CTs and PD)

2) Allow imports under licenses compatible with the current database
license (CC-BY-SA/ODbL at current) provided that the import changesets
are tagged appropriately (including a license= tag) and waive the
relicensing terms for the imports.

Of course, this means that some imports may have to be removed in a
future relicensing, but legally it seems to me that was always going
to be the case anyway.

- David

-- 
David Dean
Post-Doctoral Fellow, RP-SAIVT, QUT
(me) http://www.davidbdean.com
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