[OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 23 October 2012 11:44, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> ...
> During the license change discussion, my position was often this: Instead of
> trying to codify everything in watertight legalese, let's just make the data
> PD and write a human-readable "moral contract" that lists things we *expect*
> users to do, but don't *enforce*. - Maybe the same can be done with
> geocoding; we could agree on making no legal request for opening up any
> geodata, but at the same time make it very clear that we would consider it
> shameful for someone to exploit this in order to build any kind of "improved
> geocoding" without sharing back.

A related question is whether any agreement like that can be made
within the Contributor Terms.  With the thread about the Public Domain
OSM subset when someone said that the PD declaration had no "real
meaning" I asked myself what made that declaration different from
other license grants (I'm still not sure).  But a license, according
to Wikipedia, is an agreement not to sue under some conditions.  An
agreement not to sue under some conditions is a license.  But the OSMF
is bound by the Contributor Terms to only grant a subset of the two
licenses listed in the CT, in their specific versions.  So can it make
a statement declaring that it would not sue under some conditions
(e.g. use of the results of geocoding) and keep publishing data from
current contributions?

It can probably state that it understands the ODbL 1.0 license to
allow users to do this and that under given conditions, or to not
*apply* under some conditions in some jurisdiction (for example in
USA).  But this could also be abused by declaring something that is in
contrast with what OSM contributors think, an extreme case being a
statement that says that ODbL is effectively invalid, or that ODbL =
PDDL.  That could perhaps be treated as an agreement not to sue, i.e.
license.  So what kind of clarifications (if any) can the OSMF make
about the licenses?

As has been noted in the Public Domain subset thread, the contributors
can make license statement that they like, but the OSMF can still
enforce the database rights.  So a statement by the contributors (e.g.
on OSM wiki) that is not confirmed by the OSMF is not very helpful to
the end user.

Cheers