[Osmf-talk] Change to WMF Terms of Use: Requirements for disclosure

[Simon Poole]

We now have a significant amount of paid mapping going on and have had
some, in the grand scheme of things very minor, issues, that however
indicate how things could develop.

My, pragmatic and practical and ignoring any philosophical arguments,
personal view is:

- just as in other real world activities, an employer has far reaching
responsibilities for the actions of his employees and in generally will
be liable for issues caused by them. I can see no reason why this should
be different in OSM than in the rest of the universe.

- the DWG is a small team staffed with volunteers. It is exceedingly
unfair and a waste of their personal time to expect them to police
individual mappers misbehaving, when the people in question are actually
on the payroll of a company that is directing the activity.

- any commercial company could employ a 100, 1000 or whatever number of
low salaried staff and completely outstrip our ability to track what is
being done.

- our current contributor terms do not address the issue at all, and
there are some niggling details like ownership of intellectual property
created while working for a company that may cause problems.

Given all of the above, I can only see one consequence: our primary
contact can only be the company in question, that organisation will be
the one held responsible and likely we will need to have a specific
version of the CTs agreed to by them. To enable any of this to happen
companies will have to declare upfront what they are doing, who is on
their payroll or at least make them identifiable and be transparent
about every aspect of the undertaking.

All that said, I doubt any serious company would actually have problems
with above, given that is is just "normal business" and makes things
simpler for them too.

I can understand that there are some concerns with respect to HOT and
organized mapping in an educational environment, but I believe as long
as there are no drastic changes, this can be handled as is.

@Roland I think one of the expectations would be that mappers on a
payroll use clearly identifiable logins -and- company supplied e-mail
addresses.

Simon

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