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

[Tobias Knerr]

Ed Avis writes:
> Frederik Ramm <frederik at ...> writes:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> This does seem to be possible from a strictly legalistic point of view.
> 
> I think that in the CTs (as in other things) we should concentrate more on the
> spirit of the agreement than on trying to armour-plate it in legalese. It would
> be better to have a free and obvious choice:

This would not be better at all, it would render the whole idea of
relicensing via Contributor Terms pointless.

Non-relicenseable data should at most be an /exception/. In a situation
where using a certain source would be extremely beneficial to OSM, and
where we would only need to contact a single entity in the case of a
future license change, I understand that we might want to accept that
contributors use that source for making edits in OSM.

But this should not be a choice a single contributor can make. It would
need to be decided through some defined process on a case-by-case basis.
Through that process, we might come to the conclusion that imagery
provider O is important and reliable enough for an exception, but random
guy A from Frederik's example is not.

Tobias Knerr