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

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 6 October 2010 00:04, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Mike Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> What I was getting at:
> 1) The CTs require that incoming be licensed as CC-BY-SA, and ODbL
> *and* possible future licenses
> 2) I doubt there exists any data provider in the world that provides
> such a license as a matter of course
> 3) Therefore any incoming content would have to come from a data
> provider that *explicitly authorises it for OSM*.
> 4) Therefore the fact of any existing content being licensed under
> CC-BY-SA and/or ODbL is meaningless, because it's not enough.
>
>> 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.
>
> Again, please correct me if I'm wrong, but even if they licensed the
> data under ODbL 1.0, that's not enough for me to use that data: I
> don't have permission from the data provider to relicense it under
> PFDbL 1.1 (possible future database licence 1.1).

There are also the Public Domain dedication licenses and the
attribution-only licenses, which possibly may be treated as an
authorisation from the provider to include the data in OSM.

>
>> 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.
>
> The other alternative is to ditch the future licence clause.

I agree this would be the best option.  As far back as I looked
through the LWG meeting minutes this option was never considered
despite seemingly being supported by many mappers (one poll indicates
that the majority of those who care).  RichardF mentioned that he
asked the LWG directly to look at this option but again the minutes
don't reflect any discussion about it.

Cheers