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

[Frederik Ramm]

Mike,

> I have provisionally added Francis' suggested wording but would like
> to run it by other License Working Group members. It may help NearMap
> and similar situations.

The major change in all this, compared to the earlier versions, is the 
concept that you may now contribute data that is not re-licensable, 
right? I.e. while we require that you agree to the CT, you can still add 
data that is, say, "some form of share-alike only" which would then have 
to be removed later. Is that correct?

Question 1:

How would we, later, during some form of relicensing, know which is 
which? Is there some way, or even requirement, for the contributing user 
to tell us which license any derived material that he's contributing 
comes under?

Question 2:

Say we have a die-hard "my contributions are mine alone" person who 
wants to be asked for his ok in any future license change, thereby 
circumventing the usual "if 2/3 of active mappers agree then your data 
remains in the new database" rule.

Could someone, of that disposition, let's call him A, not simply do the 
following: Make a contract with person B that says "Dear B, you may use 
my data but only under ODBL 1.0 and nothing else"; then instruct B to 
upload the stuff to OSM. Now the data is in OSM, but in the event of any 
later license change, B (and therefore A) would have to be consulted.

Crucially, this restriction would also apply should A ever lose 
interest, or die, or be otherwise unreachable. This would effectively 
kill the whole reason why we have the license change rule in the first 
place.

Suggestion:

If my above thoughts are correct, and if this cannot be remedied - i.e. 
if we have to accept that there will always be "fully CT compatible" 
data and other, "not relicensable without agreement from rights holder" 
data - then may I suggest that we devise a way to flag such data in the 
database, and to somehow make the restricted-use data "inert" so that we 
don't (again, over the years) create a situation where many contributors 
erect their work on a foundation that may be taken away from them at any 
time?

I.e., when you upload something then you should explicitly say: "What 
I'm uploading here is to the best of my knowledge free of rights of 
others", or you would say "What I'm uploading here is compatible with 
OSM now but subject to third-party IP rights". In the latter case, 
others could either not edit your data at all (except of course deleting 
it), or they would at least see some kind of indication in their editor 
that basically tells them this data is not as free as we'd like it to 
be, and if they possess enough raw material to replace the data with 
something fully CT compatible, they should do so.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"