[OSM-legal-talk] CTs and the 1 April deadline

[Richard Fairhurst]

Robert Whittaker (OSM) wrote:
>> That is true. If OSMF wanted to release the data as PD, it would have 
>> to delete any OS OpenData-derived content first.
> However, is there any guarantee that OSMF will remove such data 
> first?

I'm not quite sure I see your point. There's no guarantee that the OSMF
board won't infringe the OS OpenData licence, sure, but there's also no
guarantee that the OSMF board won't go berserk and start gunning down
Google's executives. Both would be illegal. There are already laws about not
shooting Google executives - we don't need to explicitly add them to the
Contributor Terms.

(Of course, one of these is more illegal than the other. Discerning which
one is left as an exercise for the reader.)

> (With the current data, there's quite possibly no way to do so even 
> if they wanted to, because of poor attribution standards in the OSM
> database.

Yep. That would be a serious problem facing OSMF should it decide to
relicense without requiring attribution on produced works. You may say that
this therefore makes an attribution-free relicensing impossible now, let
alone 10 years in the future. Obviously I couldn't possibly comment.

> [...]
> Which all goes to illustrate a major problem with the current (and
> revised) CTs in that they require users to make legal judgements 
> for which they are then responsible to some extent.

Well, perhaps. OSM has always worked by consensus, good practice, and
"community guidelines". I believe OSMF's lawyers and ODC have both stressed
the importance of the last-named. It would be good to see more people
helping to codify good practice through these guidelines (and I believe LWG
has asked for help, to little avail).

Under CT 1.2.2 (I don't see much point discussing 1.0 any more), the mapper
is unambiguously informed that he/she "does not need to guarantee that it
is... compatible with our current licence terms". If strong community
guidelines exist, and the mapper has followed them, then that places the
mapper in an unassailable position. The mapper is in fact much safer than
under CC-BY-SA+no CTs, where OSMF does not formally assume any
responsibility at all.

> A much better way forward would be for the CTs to allow contributions
> for which the mapper owns all the IP (for which they can make 
> whatever grant of right to OSMF without problem) plus contributions 
> that include IP from data available under a set of licenses from a list
> defined (and updateable) by OSMF. OSMF would then be the ones 
> deciding precisely which licenses are suitable

Personally I wouldn't hugely oppose that. I don't hugely disagree with the
current CTs, either. I'd be plenty happy if there were no CTs, come to think
of it.

But you're advocating that "OSMF must make everything safe for us all", and
that is certainly not a universally held view in OSM. There are plenty of
people who think, instead, "OSMF should butt the hell out of everything". I
suspect that there'd be just as much opposition, probably more, if the CTs
said what you're suggesting. That's not a legal argument against the idea,
but it's a social one; and especially now, three years into the licence
change process, OSM is about the art of the possible.

cheers
Richard


-- 
View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/OSM-legal-talk-CTs-and-the-1-April-deadline-tp5887879p5890542.html
Sent from the Legal Talk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.