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

[John Smith]

On 5 January 2011 22:41, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> As I said to Robert last night, I don't think you need to explicitly write
> "we will not do anything illegal" into the Contributor Terms, whether the
> illegal act is shooting Google executives or deliberately distributing
> copyright material without permission.

What's with the comparisons of contract law and criminal law? This
seems like comparing apples and oranges, of course you can't kill
people, well there is even exceptions there but that is getting off
topic.

The problem here is the fact that you want to do something,
incorporate OS data into OSM, however I can't see how the current CTs,
or even any of the rivisions would allow this unless you added some
guarantees of actions that would be taken in future if the license was
changed.

> So when the CTs say that "[OSMF] may delete that data", that's just a
> warning to the user. It doesn't need to be a promise of "we won't break the
> law" because that's taken as read - especially in the light of the clause

Breaking contracts isn't usually breaking "the law", however the law
can be invoked to remedy any breaches of that contract law, however
I'm not claiming that, I'm saying you can't even do something unless
you have at least some kind of policy on outcomes of certain events
occurring, in this case putting it in the CT contract would make a lot
of sense if you actually wanted to allow others to do something that
the CTs would otherwise prohibit.

> that starts off the whole of Section 1, "We want to respect the intellectual
> property rights of others".

Which to me is typical cover your ass type clauses that exist in most
places, it doesn't state how or what would happen in cases that that
clause is breached.

This goes back to Steve Bennett's question about unagreeing to the CT,
it seems to me he breached the CTs the moment he agreed to them in
which case the CT would be null and void since nothing is specified as
to what should happen.