[OSM-legal-talk] Changeset Comments Copyright

[Kathleen Lu]

 GITNE,
I don't know what distinction you are drawing between opinion and legal
assessment. I cannot give you legal advice as I am not your lawyer, but my
legal opinion, based on the terms of the Contributor Agreement, is that
changeset comments are part of OSM's geo-database. Note that the terms say:
"OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a
database and only under the terms of one or more of the following
licences:.." So if changeset comments did not count as part of the
geo-database, OSM would not have rights to use them, which would be
contrary to the purposes of the Contributor Terms.
-Kathleen

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 5:34 AM Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:19 PM Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> For those unfamiliar with it, the OSM US' Slack instance has a
>> "feed-changeset-comments" channel which shows new changeset discussion
>> comments shortly after they are added.  There are lots of other ways of
>> getting at that data as well of course - including on osm.org itself.
>>
>
> To provide some context, this Slack channel is simply forwarding the
> contents of an Atom feed generated by Pascal Neis here:
> http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=United States
>
> IANAL, but from an intellectual property point of view, I think Pascal
> creating RSS/Atom feeds of changeset comments per country falls under fair
> use/fair dealing. And there is a whole ecosystem of tools that process and
> consume RSS/Atom feeds, one of which is an integration in Slack was setup
> by someone so that comments on changesets in the United States are more
> visible to the people who are in the OSM US Slack.
>
> ~Eugene
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