[OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change

[kevin at cordina.org.uk]

The difference in my mind between the CTs and the ODbL is the provision that allows the license to be changed at a later date, potentially without further approval of the license.  I don't believe this in ODbL.

Without getting into any consideration of the need for the clause, my purely legal concern is that this is a hugely broad rights grant and it's far from clear to me how any data, other than completely newly sourced and never before licenced can comply with it.

Kevin

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-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony <osm at inbox.org>
Sender: dipierro at gmail.com
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:33:02 
To: <kevin at cordina.org.uk>; Licensing and other legal discussions.<legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 6:23 AM,  <kevin at cordina.org.uk> wrote:
> It strikes me as two issues - changing to ODbL and, separately, the inclusion of a
> clause in the CTs allowing a future unspecified relicensing by the OSMF.  The two
> aren't, necessarily, interlinked.

And for some reason the part about the DbCL gets swept under the rug
and ignored.

The clause in the CTs which is now causing so much trouble is: "You
hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by
copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original
medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use,
and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include,
without limitation, the right to sublicense the work through multiple
tiers of sublicensees."

And yet the DbCL, which isn't even mentioned, contains a clause which
reads: "The Licensor grants to You a worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable copyright license to do any act
that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents,
whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly
include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour.
These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the
work."

> I haven't heard any fundamental objection to moving to ODbL

ODbL does have a couple fundamental flaws compared to CC-BY-SA.  It
requires distribution of the underlying database when distributing a
work produced from the database, and it allows proprietary maps to be
produced from ODbL databases.