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

[Francis Davey]

On 15 November 2010 22:47, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>

I'm not on the LWG, but I believe that this is all being considered.
Certainly these concerns have been raised before and I am sure they
are well aware of the difficulties. I doubt they are making the
assumption you suggest.

> 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.
>

Clearly if there was that assumption then it would be wrong.

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

They do at present - I think this is a well understood question. I
have certainly read statements by people who suggest this is desirable
(that is excluding licensed data sets is a positive outcome).

The current working draft license terms suggest this is not the view
taken by its drafters and they do not intend it to be the outcome:

https://docs.google.com/View?id=dd9g3qjp_933xs7nvfb

> I'm sad to hear that progress on the CTs has stalled - these versions

It doesn't look "stalled" to me:

http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes

There is progress.

> 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."
>

As you will see from reading the minutes, that doesn't seem to be the case.

-- 
Francis Davey