[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] ODbL vs CC-by-SA pros and cons

[Francis Davey]

On 29 August 2010 00:40, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mike, my understanding (and I think Grant will agree) is that copyleft is an
> idea: I publish something in such a way that coerce others into sharing
> their work with me. The implementation details of that idea (copyright law,
> contract law, unenforceable moral clauses etc) is left to the lawyers and
> the managers.

Just a point of information (I don't have a view on what the right
thing to do is concerning re-licensing nor should I): there is a
fundamental difference between licensing a property right (such as
copyright) and contract, and that is that the contract will only
protect you against a breach by the immediate end user.

As follows: if X uses your data under a contract with you that
requires use in a particular way (eg to mimic something like the GPL)
and X, in breach of that agreement, passes data to Y then barring
certain special circumstances (such as X and Y colluding) it will be
virtually impossible to prevent Y from using the data in any way they
please.

In the context of the web, Y scraping X's data where X has failed to
require that not happen would probably be sufficient and not an
unlikely circumstance at all.

Of course if there's an IP right as well Y might be breaching that,
but then you wouldn't need to use the contract, only a licence.

Contract doesn't get you what IP licensing will get you, but that
maybe the best you can do. Don't imagine that its just an
implementation detail.

-- 
Francis Davey