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

[Anthony]

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 8:21 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

There is one legitimate fear, though.  Some company in an EU state can
extract the non-copyrightable parts of OSM (*) and add it to their
database which is protected under the sui generis database right,
thereby subverting the principle of sharealike.

As far as I can tell, this is still possible under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Unported.  It's almost certainly possible under CC-BY-SA 2.0 Unported.

If the license change fixed that, and only that, without "fixing" a
dozen other non-problems, I'd be in favor of it.

Maybe we shouldn't abandon the relicensing effort, but start a new
relicensing effort, focussed on fixing the problems with CC-BY-SA
without adding on a dozen other special interest fixes like Produced
Works and Contributor Terms and Contract Law.

(*) Some will argue this is all of OSM, some will argue this is part
of OSM, but I think pretty much everyone agrees that some of it is
non-copyrightable.