[OSM-legal-talk] Compliance timeline

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 04/08/2011 10:21 AM, Rob Myers wrote:
>> I think it would make more sense to work with the Creative Commons people on
>> CC-BY-SA version 4, so we can upgrade licences without deleting any data or
>> requiring every contributor to transfer rights to the OSMF.  Then everyone could
>> just keep on mapping.
>
> I'm not sure how much wriggle room there is for addressing OSM's
> concerns about BY-SA in the 4.0 revision process as it hasn't actually
> been announced yet.

The noises emanating from CC seem to say basically that

1. certainly no CC-BY-SA 4.0 in 2011 and perhaps not even in 2012;
2. CC will not write licenses that restrict content over and above what 
is protected by law in any given country.

While I personally find #2 honourable - after all they are for open data 
and against adding restrictions so it does make sense - this would, in 
our specific case, mean that we have no solution for the problem that 
our data is not protected in the US.

Also, Ed, I think that your wording "transfer rights to the OSMF" wrong 
because under the new scheme rights are not transferred, just granted. 
One of the major advantages of this is that OSMF is then the publisher 
of the database and thereby OSMF (and in extension, the community) is in 
a position to authoritatively interpret the license answer questions 
like "can I do X", something that we cannot do today.

I.e. even if we were planning to switch to CC-BY-SA 4, the Contributor 
Terms would still make a lot of sense.

Bye
Frederik