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

[john wilbanks]

Yup, I said this:

"I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is
already unprotected [under CC-BY-SA], and you cannot slap a license on
it and protect it. ... That means I'm free to ignore any kind of
share-alike you apply to your data. I've got a download of the OSM
data dump. I can repost it, right now, as public domain."

Said Matt Amos: very probably that wasn't the official creative commons 
line, and he wasn't a lawyer, but neither have i seen his comments 
officially refuted by anyone at CC.

Nope, wasn't an "official line". It was a point about how easy it is to 
extract and republish data if you want do do so, because of the inexact 
reaches of copyright, database rights, and contract. The point was to be 
provocative, not to make a threat.

I'm not ever going to republish a copy of the OSM data dump, because 
that would be an asshole maneuver (which, as an American, is I believe 
the King's English phrasing). But someone who didn't care about being an 
asshole could do so, and the remedies are a lot less clear than they are 
in software and culture. If the asshole isn't in the EU, and didn't get 
a copy under contract, what do you do? That was my point - to make 
people think about that.

CC also isn't Science Commons. We got absorbed last year by CC, and CC's 
a lot more about providing choices, not about being normative. Our job 
at SC was to be normative, to push for more open uses of the tools 
inside the CC suite of tools. That's why we didn't *recommend* the use 
of the licenses on data in the sciences, and I was kind of naive in 
jumping over into your community and yelling about those terms here.

I apologize for that. This isn't a science community. It's not publicly 
funded. And I'm not part of it. I shouldn't have gotten onto the list 
and ranted without spending time getting to know the community. Indeed, 
i've done a little mapping since then even.

So I backed out, and let you guys hash it out, and I worked out my 
differences with OKF via the Panton Principles 
(http://pantonprinciples.org)- public science data should be in the 
public domain - while I let CC take over the conversation about data 
licensing generally.

I remain an advocate for the public domain for data, and a skeptic as to 
the ability to magically port the tools of free culture and free 
software to free data. But I'm a lot less stressed about it than I used 
to be. Part of that is that the capacity to create data is so great - 
data that doesn't get licensed well won't get well used, whatever the 
tools chosen - and part of that is the result of talking to a lot more 
people who are in open data outside the sciences.

Keep on posting old text that I cited, as I won't run from my own words. 
We all own what we say on lists. As I said, I shouldn't have gotten on 
here and posted so rashly, but it is what it is.

But also keep watching the CC site and blog for information, because CC 
is the only one that speaks for CC. Science Commons ain't the voice of 
CC for data, and never was, and it's our collective fault in both parts 
of the organization that we allowed that to happen (as Mike Linksvayer 
pointed out in a post earlier this year at 
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26283).

Back to lurking.

jtw

-- 
John Wilbanks
VP for Science
Creative Commons
web: http://creativecommons.org/science
blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge
twitter: @wilbanks