[talk-au] Database licence

[James Livingston]

On 05/12/2009, at 10:29 PM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote:
> 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.

Databases in Australia actually have more protection than in somewhere like the US, because they have their own inherent copyright. But that protection is *very* different to what EU database rights are, particularly in light of the High Courts ruling on what is "substantial". The biggest problem is that no-one knows exactly how it works any more, and how much of Desktop Marketing was reversed - lawyers are divided and we won't know until we get more court rulings based on the fall-out.


> 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.

No, the vote whether to re-license is only for OSMF members. Future re-licensing done under the powers granted by the proposed contributor terms will require a vote of OSMF members and a vote of active contributors. Non-members do have some say though, you can refuse to agree to the re-licensing and contributor terms - if enough people reject them or can't be contacted, then I believe that the OSMF board might consider keeping CC in use, but that would require a fairly large amount of  people to do so.


As I understand if you reject the ODbL+terms, then any way/POII/whatever you have ever touched will be removed or reverted to the oldest non-acceptor's edit. I have no idea how they're planning on tracing the history through way merges and splits, but apparently that's how it's going to work. Unless we get close to 100% acceptance (which isn't likely, or maybe even possible) then it's going to severely screw up the data.



The biggest problem I see is not with the ODbL itself (although I have reservations about it, particularly around the use of contract law), but the contributor terms. Currently:
* We can import data licensed CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, for example most/all of data.australia.gov.au stuff
* We may not be able to use data from derived databases, because (arguably) CC-BY-SA isn't enforceable

With ODbL+contributor terms:
* We won't be able to import CC-BY(-SA) data unless the copyright holder agrees to the terms letting us relicense it without their approval
* We may not be able to use data from derived databases, because even though people have to release it, they don't have to agree to the terms.


I fail to see how there is any benefit from moving to ODbL, and so will be voting against it too. My 2c.