[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Contact And Remap Campaign

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

(taking this to legal-talk from talk where it doesn't belong)

On 02/13/12 00:00, nicholas.g.lawrence at tmr.qld.gov.au wrote:
> I accepted the license, and also ticked the box that said I was happy with
> my contributions to be considered public domain.
>
> Hypothetically, if some years in the future, OSMF proposed a switch to
> public domain,
> can they assume my acceptance from that?

OSMF could certainly release *your* contributions under Public Domain 
(since you have checked the box, and "advisory" or not, there would be a 
reasonably solid legal basis for doing that).

Regarding a possible future switch to Public Domain, this is a difficult 
issue. In theory, OSMF can choose to switch to any "free and open" 
license if 2/3 of active mappers agree. PD is a "free and open" license 
so that would be possible, providing that enough mappers find it a good 
idea.

At the same time, OSMF promises in the CT "to attribute You or the 
copyright owner. A mechanism will be provided, currently a web page 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution."

This can be read - as Simon seems to do it - to mean "the CTs guarantee 
that required attribution will survive any future licence changes", but 
I think he's on thin ice there; in my reading, the CTs promise that OSMF 
will provide attribution, not that OSMF will only ever release your data 
under licenses that guarantee attribution down the line.

But Simon is right when he says "data with such requirements would have 
to be removed". This means that if we ever wanted to go PD, then we'd 
have to find out which data has some kind of attribution requirement 
attached, and remove that data before we go PD. Since we don't require 
such data to be identified at the moment, that would be one hell of a job.

In my eyes, this is a very sad development that undermines any future 
license change, even one to a non-PD license. Earlier versions of the CT 
basically required you to *only* contribute data of which you could 
surely say that it could be relicensed freely under the provisions of 
"free and open" and "2/3 of mappers agree". This as been whittled down 
to "you can contribute anything that is compatible with the current 
license and you don't even have to *tell* us what further restrictions 
it is under". Any future license change has therefore become very 
unlikely - except maybe a switch back to a CC license -, and not much 
remains of the license change provision in the CTs.

Bye
Frederik