[OSM-legal-talk] Checking if I understand correctly...

[Mike Collinson]

At 02:58 AM 5/10/2010, Steve Bennett wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 8:15 PM, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
>> The particular issues I believe you have concerns with have also been
>> discussed extensively on this list. You wont be surprised if I say that not
>> everyone agrees with you interpretation.
>
>Oh? Which bit - and  what's the consensus interpretation?
>
>> However the CT's are currently being revised,
>> https://docs.google.com/View?id=dd9g3qjp_81272pvt54   and the revised
>> version probably  will give you less concern.
>
>Not really - the change from "you must be the copyright owner" to "you
>must have permission from the copyright owner to relicense their work"
>doesn't really change anything, I don't think? Either way, existing
>CC-BY-SA content is inadmissible without explicit authorisation from
>its owner. (In other words, existing CC-BY-SA licensing is worthless,
>since you need explicit permission anyway.)
>
>But if I'm incorrect, please tell me.

I think there are two issues here.

A CC-BY-SA license *is* an explicit permission to you by the rights holder.  So that is not a problem and we will revise the CTs to better communicate that in plain language.

But what is a problem is that applying a CC-BY-SA license to highly factual information is very vague as to what you can actually do (or, more correctly, what you should not do) and is not recommended by the authors of the license.  

So you really need to go back to the actual rights holder and ask them to clarify what they personally/organisationally are happy with, or better still, use a more appropriate license.  That is a major reason we want to move away from it ourselves.

The other alternative is for us collectively to get a highly authoritative source to say that a CC-BY-SA license on data could reasonably be interpreted as giving permission to contribute to OSM. I'll find out where we are on that.

Mike