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

Dermot McNally dermotm at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 19:50:19 BST 2011


On 8 June 2011 17:59, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer <olaf at amen-online.de> wrote:

> I am willing to grant the OSFM + 2/3 of the community the right to relicense
> my contributions in the following ways:
> * the current versions of the ODbL and/or of the CC-BY-SA,
> * all past and future versions of the ODbL and/or of the CC-BY-SA,
> * all licenses that follow the Share-Alike/Copyleft principle, and

That's not a bad start - but if I play spot-the-missing-bit, it looks
to me that you aren't prepared to trust 2/3 of the community to decide
that (for reasons not yet forseen) a licence other than the two you
list and which may not be copyleft/sharealike.

The difficulty I see is what might happen under those unforseen
circumstances. Let's take a fanciful (but not impossible) assumption
that in 50 years, the various map data providers operating either free
beer or speech policies (as of today that would include OSM for speech
and Google for beer) have transformed the landscape to the extent that
Navteq decides that map data is a commodity, that they too will give
away what they have, will integrate the concept of Community into
their data maintenance and otherwise try to out-OSM OSM.

Now, keep in mind that this is a fanciful example, so let's not be
sidetracked by whether we think they would ever do such a thing. The
issue is that the OSM Community at that time would find themselves
having to consider how OSM should fit in a world where this had
happened. Let's further suppose that some users of geodata continued
to find obstacles to using OSM, but seized on the opportunity to
exploit this newly freed Navteq data which, let's just suppose, had
been declared PD.

Such a development might in fact prove to be a game-changer. The OSM
Community might well find that, in a world where geodata is often PD,
sharealike is the kiss of death for a project. It therefore seems
important to equip The Community of the future to decide on all
aspects of future licence policy, including a yes or no to sharealike.

Your preference should a situation like this arise seems to be:

> * all other licenses if I am contacted and do not object within 6 weeks.

So in 50 years time (and I hope that we are both still alive to cast
our vote at that time), each of us will get the chance to express
ourselves on this important matter. My interpretation of your 6 week
timeout is that, should you be unreachable, bored or dead, The
Community is free to make the decision without you, and that's
certainly an improvement over where we are today.

But suppose you are reachable - suppose you consider the issue for a
week and decide to say no, but a solid majority of mappers say yes. 50
years worth of the stuff you mapped and anything sitting on top of it
(which I'm going to claim will, by then, have diluted your own stuff
into insignificance) will have to be removed somehow. And that's just
not fair.

If your data gets contributed to a project where it will by definition
be mixed with those of other mappers you have to accept that the
decision-making process of what may be fairly done with the mixed data
set must also be shared with those same mappers. We can talk about
what percentage should constitute a strong majority. We can talk about
how to prevent gerrymandering of the pool of eligible voters.

But we shouldn't and mustn't talk about vetoes. Today every "old"
mapper has a veto on changes of this sort. Your list above proposes to
grant a one-time mandate to allow for a specific foreseen licence
change deemed necessary. But it proposes to retain the veto. Not one
of us is so important to OSM that he or she has the right to stand in
the way of the accountable will of The Community.

Dermot

-- 
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ja ma oma ei leiagi üles



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