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

[Rob Myers]

On 08/30/2010 01:21 AM, John Smith wrote:
>
> 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 are still assuming that copyright is universally valid despite court 
cases that demonstrate that it isn't.

> 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

No, this is about caring about the stated aims of the project rather 
than fetishising a licence that is not even recommended for use on data 
by its own authors.

> 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

The law in one of those various (sic) jurisdictions is still in flux. 
And if government IP lawyers are the same as most corporate IP lawyers 
they wont have a very good grasp either of the limits of copyright or of 
alternative licencing. Francis's post supports this.

OSM is a global project. What is correct for one government in their own 
jurisdiction may not be correct for another.

> aren't able to change laws to make map data copyrightable?

If OSM ends up asking governments to reduce people's freedom to use map 
data in order to restore that freedom, do you really think that would be 
a good idea?

- Rob.