[OSM-legal-talk] Nearmap vs CTs: any progress?

[Steve Bennett]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ben Last <ben.last at nearmap.com> wrote:
> In order to derive data from nearmap.com PhotoMaps, you must agree to our
> community licence, which says:
> "If you derive information from observing our PhotoMaps, and include that
> information in a work, you will own that work, and may distribute it to
> others under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licence."
>  In other words, you're constrained in what you can do with that derived
> work.  If you trace a street or a feature, that is a derived work, and you
> can distribute it under a CC-BY-SA licence.  But paragraph 2 of the CTs
> requires that you grant OSMF a much wider licence than CC-BY-SA, which you
> can't do, because you only have the right to distribute your derived work
> under CC-BY-SA.

It seems there is an assumption by the authors of the CTs that, as the
contributor of data:
1) you own the copyright to that data; and therefore
2) you can, and are willing to, grant an extremely wide licence to OSMF

However, this assumption is incorrect in at least these two cases:
1) You don't own the data, but it is licensed CC-BY-SA (or similar),
and therefore it would be compatible with OSM.
2) You own the data, but are prevented for other reasons (such as
NearMap's community licence) from granting the extremely wide licence
OSMF requires.

The bottom line is this: the CTs make open licences an insufficient
condition for inclusion of content into OSM.

I'm sad to hear that progress on the CTs has stalled - these versions
seem horribly flawed. Or, if my above conclusions are correct, and
intentional, there should be a big public statement explaining this
change in policy. Not simply "We are making changes to allow a future
change in licensing, and this is a little administrative matter", but
"We have decided to no longer accept open source content. All
submitted content must be either fully owned by the contributor, with
no restrictions, or submitted with the explicit permission of the
copyright owner."

Steve