[talk-au] Can't see the facts for the FUD

[Matt White]

Many moons ago, I had a long chat while at the nags with my tame IT IP 
lawyer about all things map and copyright related. While it wasn't paid 
for legal advice (which makes no difference as the paid advice doesn't 
mean much either apart from a slightly better nights sleep), his basic 
opinion on using only copyright to protect the OSM data was that it 
probably really wouldn't do the job at all. He said that in the AU legal 
domain, we'd be better off with some sort of contractual arrangement as 
well, over copyright alone. This was prior to the IceTV ruling, (so the 
status quo at the time was the DTMS case), but he thought that 
eventually that we would get a Feist-like ruling in Australia - which we 
sort of did with IceTV (ish).

The reality is that we don't know which one is better until both CC by 
SA and ODbl are directly challenged in court - something I seriously 
doubt will ever happen.

In reality, OSM, due to lack of funds etc, can really only just jump up 
and down and scream if there is a license breach, but can't easily take 
the offender to court (unless the offender is a really small fish and 
easily scared).

Best chance we have is to become ubiquitous, rather than dominating...

Anyway, the licence debate has degenerated almost to the acrimonious 
depths of the Liberal party at this stage...

And for a quick (semi) light hearted look at the debate (beautifully 
combined wth the recent footpath  "discussion", have a look at the 
latest post from fakestevec - http://fakestevec.blogspot.com

Matt

John Smith wrote:
> 2009/12/7 Liz <edodd at billiau.net>:
>   
>> and we are not in a position to agree to a change without am opinion by a
>> lawyer on our lawyer, not a licence working group member's opinion on our law.
>>     
>
> I agree, but I don't have any legal resources at my disposal, although
> the OSGeo guys might.
>
>   
>> James has been pointing out that the Feds, who can afford good lawyers, find
>> CC-by-Sa and CC-by as quite satisfactory in Australia.
>>     
>
> As far as I can gather CC-BY-SA most likely won't work in the US, so I
> can only guess that this whole issue is to fix the US problem and a
> potential issue with streaming data that has only been shown in theory
> and not in any court.
>