[Osmf-talk] Blanket copyright licence in Contributor Terms
Gervase Markham
gerv at gerv.net
Sun Dec 13 01:09:34 UTC 2009
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
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