[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

[John Smith]

On 30 August 2010 08:05, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> The worst thing that could happen is the license change failing and OSMF
> afterwards pretending that we were still a share-alike project.

You are still making the assumption that copyright isn't valid at all,
to the best of my knowledge there has been no court case about map
data.

You also seem to care more about legal technicalities than the spirit
of the license, maybe some other map company could come in and take
the data and just use it, but then it becomes much harder for them to
in turn claim any sort of copyright on their own work, not to mention
all the bad press they would get from it.

That's before you start considering all the various government data
released under copyright licenses. Are you saying all their lawyers
have no clue about copyright laws, or that the governments themselves
aren't able to change laws to make map data copyrightable?