[Osmf-talk] Blanket copyright licence in Contributor Terms

[Gervase Markham]

On 12/12/09 16:33, Matt Amos wrote:
> and also that the Contents are effectively PD, but anyone downloading
> planet.osm is effectively downloading a database. so each individual
> Content item has a very liberal license, but when used in Substantial
> amounts is governed by the ODbL.

So if OSM accepts a contribution from a 3rd party "under the ODbL", what 
is the licence of the individual data items? Anything they like? Even 
something restrictive? Are we back to the position where we effectively 
have to get the original owner of the database to sign the Contributor 
Terms in order to take their "ODbLed" contribution?

One of the big points of share-alike licences is that you can, without 
asking permission, incorporate other content under the same licence into 
your content. The more we look, the more we seem to be discovering ways 
that this isn't in fact true of the currently-proposed licensing scheme. 
And if it's not, then it's not a suitable licence to switch to if 
"preserve the share-alike" is one of the design goals - as we are told 
it is.

I'm entirely in favour of switching to a licence which is a) like 
CC-BY-SA in share-alike, and b) is better suited for data. The LWG has 
made a good case that the ODbL is b), but it seems increasingly 
uncertain that it's actually a).

Gerv