[OSM-legal-talk] Someone ought to do something ... dealing with violations of OSM's geodata license

ce-test, qualified testing bv - Gert Gremmen g.gremmen at cetest.nl
Mon Mar 21 19:07:10 GMT 2011


 

Francis wrote:

 

>I certainly agree that taking legal action should be low on any list.

>It can be expensive, risky and time consuming.

 

+1 

 

>If you want to prevent unattributed uses and so on, having a dedicated

>team of volunteers to work out the best approaches (and different

>approaches will work in different ways in different circumstances) is

>probably best. Whether you want to do that is another matter.

 

Should we want to be attributed ? To satisfy pedantic ego inside us ?

Can we never give something to the world without asking back ???

Do we need to be cited ? Does anyone read attributions ?

 

None of us can enforce any license to any serious player on the market

trying to steal "our" data. Commercial maps are a business of millions

of dollars. Any legal action is wasting (our) lots money, and even
worse,

will not lead to any compensations, as we don't make money with our data
(so

we can't lose any either -but for the enforcement-)

I mean, what will be the net result of such an enforcement, as we do

not benefit nor loose from the mere fact that our license/attribution

is being respected or not.

Enforcing licenses/attributions is a sure way to  lose what we do have
in plenty:

 

-    the open and free  image

-    sympathy among literally hundreds of thousands

-    information about our world to give to its citizen in wealth and in
disaster

 

 

 

The only way to go is making OSM free as in free ! 

Free OSM effectively stops the big players of making money with geodata 

and that is the only way we can actually "enforce" that what we actually
promise on our (wiki)home page:

 

"OpenStreetMap creates and provides free geographic data such as street
maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps
you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on
their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive,
or unexpected ways"

 

Gert

 

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