[Osmf-talk] Future of DWG work, copyright, vandalism

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

Frederik,

what you posted seems already well thought out. A few comments to your
questions below

2012/6/7 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> B. Continuing Vandalism
> There are three things we can do:
>
> * technical measures - try to profile the vandal and disallow signups or
> edits that match the pattern.


Apparently the best solution which should be the primary means against
vandals. There should also be a method to provide feedback to this
automatic detection (e.g.: "if you feel it was unjustified to block
access to you, please report here..."). Another idea could be that
existing mappers verify the identity of new  mappers (see below).


> * policy measures - stop giving full edit privileges to every new user;
> instead, make it so that new users have some limits such as so-and-so many
> edits per day, or only make edits within a certain range of your home
> location, or you have to be "vouched for" by at least two other mappers
> before you can edit for real, whatever. One would have to find a policy that
> takes the fun out of vandalism while not being a turn-off for real mappers.


-0.5
I think we can keep this in the backhand if we see that the problem
gets bigger and can not be handled otherwise, but it is really a
showstopper for some mappers (e.g. you want to map some stuff from
your last vacation, or the place you grew up, or ...). Any kind of
policy will also create false positives, so it reduces the fun.


> * legal measures - pay lawyers to go to court and request the real address
> of the IP number that vandalizes our data, then send nasty letters to people
> and demand money.


-0.5
this would also cause some collateral damage IMHO, e.g. the recording
industry is not among the businesses with the best reputation. If we
start putting cases on little kids we might exxagerate, while this is
surely an option to pursue when it comes to competitors vandalizing
the map.


> But I fear that the New Testament approach to vandalism ("If someone
> vandalizes Oslo, let him vandalize London as well...") won't do either. I
> would prefer that we make our minds up about all this *before* we have to
> use it.


We would have to change the CT in order to allow the comunity to ban
convicted vandals for a limited time (say 3 or 6 months, 2 years,
etc.). Of course this wouldn't stop them automatically from signing up
again, but if they did, it was against the CT and could be pursuable.
This requires to have (verified) actual information about the real
person (at least name and city, maybe date and place of birth or even
social insurance or passport number). I think we are starting to be
big enough in many places to do crowdsourced identification assurance
(something like CA Cert does).

On the other hand this would probably slowdown the process of getting
new mappers in areas that are already suffering from less
participants. Maybe we could have different policies dependent from
where the mapper signs up (e.g. density of mappers or density of map
data). In the end technical measures will always be circumnavigatable
(proxies, ecc.).

cheers,
Martin