[talk-au] Database licence

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Liz <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
> There has been a great number of mails on osmf-talk about an upcoming vote on
> the database licence.
But no notice on the site or wiki. I suppose it isn't "official" discussion.

> Sadly, I'd like to say that I will not be supporting the proposed new licence.
> It is designed around European law, and gives "database protection" which is
> not a legal concept which is likely to apply here, after the recent High Court
> case Nine vs IceTv, when the database was not afforded "protection".
Certainly we should make this case clear to the OSM community.
Database protection always seemed to be a euro-centric ideal and not
one that the new licence analysis seemed to respond to adequately.
However, I believe that the ODbL constitutes both a licence and a
contract (especially in jurisdictions where copyright protection is
insufficient). So while you might not have a claim for copyright
infringement in protecting OSM data, you would still be able to assert
a breach of contract under one of the clauses such as the obligation
to Share Alike.

> I've been thinking about the imports from ABS and the Qld government. That
> data is licensed CC-by-SA and would have to be *removed* from OSM as we cannot
> negotiate with ABS and Qld for the new, non-existent licence with no basis in
> Australian law. This would make a whacking hole in our data and make our map
> look like an empty shell.

If we're working on the assumption that Nine vs. IceTV applies to
geographical databases and there's no copyright protection for them,
why do we have to care about licences at all in Australia anymore?
Certainly, there was some discussion about those licences even being
appropriate for releasing those databases (it was suggested that CC0
or public domain might be better).
I wouldn't bet on Nine vs. IceTV applying to every collection of raw
data and I agree that I would oppose a licence change that would lead
us to have to renegotiate every data import...

>
> Only those who belonged to OSMF in Oct 09 will get a vote. Those who are
> 'merely' contributors will only get to be asked if they will relicense their
> data or not. Only data from people who agree to relicensing will go forward
> into the new licence.
Oh dear. I thought it was going to be an active contributor vote (you
had to have X edits in the last Y months) but looking at the threads
on osmf-talk it looks like that disappeared.