[OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 06/07/11 06:27, Mike Dupont wrote:
> The people are not being asked to agree to a license in general, but
> to give up an allow the board to tweak the license for them.

No.

There are three ways in which the license can be changed in the future.

1. Ask everyone to relicense to "X". This is possible with the current 
license also (and with every other license, obviously).

2. Use the automatic "... or later ..." upgrade path built into the 
license. This is possible with CC-BY-SA and with ODbL, and depends on 
the license issuer publishing a "later" version of the license.

3. OSMF to choose a new license that is "free and open", present it to 
OSM community for vote, and get 2/3 of active mappers to agree with the 
new license. This is the only bit that is new, and the "2/3 of mappers" 
hurdle can hardly be called "allow the board to tweak the license".

> What is upsetting for me is that there is no porting process like with
> creative commons, and any leverage one might have will be lost when
> you agree to the CT.

I don't understand the bit about the porting process at all. What good 
is it? Creative Commons have their CC-BY-SA ported to lots of 
jurisdictions but OSM has never made use of that; we have always 
licensed everything under the plain CC-BY-SA and if any "ported" variant 
had contained a significant difference, then good luck before a court.

The bit about using leverage is done on purpose. We are in this 
together. We are building something together. We have to make sure that 
we can continue to work as a community, and we cannot allow the 
individual a "leverage" that they could use to hurt us. If we ever 
change the license again, 2/3 of active mappers will have to say yes, 
but that's it - the remaining 1/3 will not be able to hold the project 
to ransom (or "use their leverage") to force their will on the majority.

> This process is about you giving up all your rights to approve license
> change or have any personal say as a normal contributor in the OSM,
> not them doing anything like producing a *final* and complete license
> or terms for review, spending the effort to port the license to other
> jurisdictions, or present a plan for how to harmonize with the
> creative commons in return.

Whereas you would like to sit there, on every single one of these 
issues, and say: "I'll withdraw my data if you don't do <X>"? And the 
same with a couple 10000 other contributors, all saying "I'll withdraw 
my data if you don't do <X>"? Thanks, but no thanks.

We have a process for democratically electing the OSMF board; even 
non-members can participate in OSMF working groups and to my knowledge 
nobody has ever been forced out of a a working group for any reason at 
all. So there is ample opportunity for everybody to participate in the 
hard work that needs to be done. I have no patience with people who will 
not do this themselves, but instead demand the board do it for them.

> I think that granting osmf these rights will reduce any possible
> future negotiation strength

I think too much negotiation strength resting on too many shoulders is 
likely to be detrimental. It doesn't require a lot of imagination to 
draw up sitations where 100 mappers say "if you do <X> I'll go" and 100 
others say "if you don't do <X> I'll go"...

The rest of your posting is difficult to understand for me. You seem to 
suggest that there could be some kind of distributed infrastructure for 
OSM. I find that very interesting, and worth thinking about for the 
future, but I don't think it should be mixed with the license 
discussion. Whether or not archive.org have some petabytes to spare 
certainly is not relevant to our cause for license change.

> The other point to mention is that for the wikipedia hosted tiles,
> what will happen when the quality of areas goes down the tubes after
> the data deletions,

We're planning to have most things remapped by CT supporters before we 
make the switch, so it will hardly be noticeable.

> maybe in some areas you have an over abundance of
> mappers, but in some parts of the world you will have data loss. On
> those areas we should consider using the backup of the osm data for
> wikipedia tiles where it will be better.

Yeah, sure. Remember that our own hosted tiles will likely remain 
CC-BY-SA even after we switch to ODbL. We could even continue producing 
tiles from an old data source in some areas of the world if we liked, or 
we could change www.openstreetmap.org to dynamically use tiles from some 
old server if we liked. But all that are technical desicions that we 
will have to make when we actually go to phase 5, which will be late 
2011 at best, and in my opinion more likely 2012.

> It should be something that OSMF should be doing, instead
> of trying to force people to accept the new CTs they should allow them
> to continue on a separate database while the new regime is tested. But
> since I am not part of the OSMF I am forced to build these tools
> outside of the foundations, and am them attacked as the enemy. Why am
> I the enemy? I dont want to be the enemy, I am also interested in
> helping map the world. Lets work together on points we can agree on.

The biggest problem I have with your attitude is that you spread false 
information ("sign away all your rights" etc.) which are suitable to 
make others, who until now were relatively unconcerned, doubt the 
sincerity of OSMF. Your messages could make some people get the idea 
that OSMF is a sinister group of people who want to take away the rights 
of the individual to the detriment of the project. That is untrue; but 
it is hard to prove that it is untrue. That way, you are damaging the 
project.

If, instead of "DON'T SIGN THAT! THEY WILL TAKE AWAY ALL YOUR RIGHTS!" 
you would say "ok, these OSMF folks are hell-bent on this ODbL course, 
let's work together on damage mitigation, let's make analyses, let's 
find ways to produce tiles that bridge the gap", etc.etc. then I think 
nobody would complain.

Bye
Frederik