[OSM-legal-talk] Statement from nearmap.com regarding submission of derived works from PhotoMaps to OpenStreetMap

[Francis Davey]

2011/6/17 Ben Last <ben.last at nearmap.com>:
>
> The goal of that statement was to allow any contributions that have been
> derived from our PhotoMaps under our current licence (which is what imposes
> the CC-BY-SA redistribution condition) can remain in the OSM db.  Not being
> a lawyer, I'm not going to comment on how the statement may or may not
> achieve that; I'm not qualified to interpret it.  All I can do is make it
> clear that it was drafted to explicitly allow derived data to stay in the
> database.  I've seen the background correspondence about it, and I know the
> lawyers involved were well aware of the CTs, the OdBL, the future licence
> terms, etc, when they drafted it.

Thanks for that.

Speaking as a lawyer for a moment - and trying to be helpful, though I
detect some irritation at what I am saying - as a matter of strict
reading, the first statement of Ben's in this thread quite clearly
states that OSMF may continue to use nearmap data but may not licence
it under ODbL. In particular the "clarification" paragraph contains
the sentence:

"The OSMF are making a change to the contributor terms which makes
them incompatible with the requirement, under our community licence,
that derived works be distributed only under CC-BY-SA.  We are not
able to change our licence to allow distribution of derived works
under unspecified future licences."

Which is about as categorical as it can be. Some responses to my email
explaining this haven't been happy with that conclusion and have
complained about it, but the fact that information is unwelcome and
unwanted doesn't make it untrue.

Now, people don't always write what they mean. And some of the rest of
what Ben says appears (confusingly) to contradict that plain statement
at the end and the way in which the lawyer drafted paragraphs operate.
As a matter of law (and here Australian law is similar enough to
English law that I am confident it is right for there as here),
provided Ben appears to have the authority to speak on nearmap's
behalf, what he says in this email is quite enough to rely on. A court
would read the entirety of the correspondence and conclude that,
however confused his first statement, what he says later on makes it
clear precisely what he is trying to do.

If any other project wants to do this in the future having them say:
"we are happy for you to keep any data that has already been
contributed to the map and for you to relicense it under any licence
selected in accordance with your existing contributor terms" would be
entirely sufficient."

So, thank you Ben for the additional clarification and thank you
everyone else for bearing with my trying to nail this down. I know it
appears annoying and pedantic to some, but if you care about legal
issues at all that is how it has to be some times.

-- 
Francis Davey