[Osmf-talk] Translations of the ODBL

[Jaak Laineste]

> On Monday, July 26, 2010 12:38:30 pm Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > 2. OKFN would have to pay lawyers who speak both languages to actually
> > vouch for the correctness of the translation. This is going to cost a
> > huge amount of money even if we'd only do it for European languages.
> > And still we'd need to say that the binding text is the English one.
> 
> you would notice that even the GPL does not have official translations as
no one
> wants to take the risk - I assume the BSD license is ok ;-)

 The main issue would there not be translation itself, but the fact that
most probably every national lawyer will find out that the agreement itself
needs localization to be fit with local law. In some cases you even need to
get approval for the agreements from consulates. Also there are legal terms
which cannot be easily translated from the common law to civil law etc. You
can claim there that English law applies, but then you end up having e.g.
Estonian legal text which can be tested in English court only, which needs
all the translations back to English there etc. etc. Hopefully we never need
to test this out.

 Locals (like myself) can do informational short translations, this is
hopefully enough.

 Another route would be to have fully distributed legal system: separate
licenses and/or CT in each country. This gives interesting options, like
having PD in some countries and SA license in others; but I hope we can live
without this at least during my lifetime. 

 I have more practical case also: I just got informed that according to our
law all the donations to some organization who is not in our national list
of "non-taxable" NGO-s need to be taxed quite heavily (total ~50% of the
given amount). In theory also value of digital map data can be evaluated and
if we will donate this it to OSMF then our tax agency could think that they
want to get the taxes too. Commercial value of some detailed digital city
maps what we have got and partially imported would be quite significant. One
possible solution would be that contributions would legally not go to the
OSMF, but to the local chapter, who is properly registered, and who has done
the legal work to be sure that all agreements are compatible with both OSMF
and local law. This is just something good to know for the future, right now
it is practical to try to apply English national laws globally. I'm afraid
it would not work in court level, but let's hope we'll never need to find it
out.

 
Jaak