[OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested

[mike at ayeltd.biz]

Quoting Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>:
>  <mike at ...> writes:
>> 2) good faith - are we making a reasonable effort to remove the IP of
>> folks who have not given us permission to continue? I certainly agree
>> with Ed that we should treat ex-contributors no differently to any IP
>> owner ... but feel we are already doing that in this and other
>> conversations.
>
> Mike, in that case I would ask you to apply the 'Google Maps test'.  If some
> map data were entered by copying from a third party who did not give  
> permission,
> but then edited in good faith, how much of the data needs to be unpicked?
> In the past OSMF has taken a very cautious approach to this, which I believe
> is the right one.

Ed,

Yes, that certainly seems reasonable to me though I would bow to the  
more technically clued up, such as the Data Working Group. I would  
speculate that it is an issue that has not come up, where there has  
not been any significant subsequent edit activity the simplest and  
most effective use of everyone's time is a simpler revert.

> If after careful consideration you do formulate a policy ('the LWG  
> declares that
> creating a node is not a creative operation, so it can be kept as  
> long as it has
> been moved by somebody else afterwards', or whatever you decide),  
> then it should
> also be applied to such third-party-copyright situations going forward.

Again, very reasonable to me going forward.

> Originally it was promised that no big deletion would go ahead if it  
> would cause
> too much damage to the OSM data.  Is that still the case and if so  
> who is tasked
> with deciding whether to pull the switch?

Community assent ... sounds vague to some may be, but has worked well  
so far.  Someone gave a good assessment in this or the Editing of  
Content thread, sorry I cannot access it at the moment.  By a number  
of measures, we are in the range of 95% of data good to go, so I'd  
personally say we are already at the no big deletion stage. We can  
still increase that though, so we should. We've also said that we also  
want to take local hotspots into consideration ... the UK, Germany and  
Spain have a lot of red spots for example.  The LWG's main task at the  
moment is to get more undecided and non-responders on board and to  
facilitate a small number of contributors who can say yes to some but  
not all their contributions.  Any chance of you changing your decline  
now, that is the easiest way of decreasing deletions?

Mike