[Talk-us] Resigning in protest

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu May 13 12:07:31 BST 2010


Andrzej,

andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>> 1) A creates road; B edits road; C edits road.
>> 2) A creates road; B deletes road; C undeletes road.
> 
> Well, I can kind of see a problem here (and am not in the states now
> :-) ).  In both situations the final version is a derived work of
> version A or B, or even a copy.  User C obtained version B under
> CC-By-SA, but claims to hold copyright of it and grant all the rights
> to OSMF when she uploads her change.

That's not how it works. If what you sketched here was true, then 
anything in OSM that I have edited last would be PD[*] because I say so. 
But in reality, changing the license of something in OSM generally 
requires consent from all those who ever modified it.

In some cases it could be argued that changing the license of something 
requires even the consent of those having modified neighboring objects 
(e.g. you draw a road junction, I add the pub - could I have added the 
pub without your preceding work?). In other cases it could be argued 
that changing the license of something requires no consent because the 
change in question is primitive enough not to warrant copyright (e.g. a 
bot corrects a spelling mistake, does the bot operator now have to be 
asked about license change for this object?). There may also be cases 
where an object is so thoroughly changed that this effectively amounts 
to deleting the old and re-creating a new object; in these cases one 
could say that the creator of the original object has lost any claim to 
copyright on that particular object. I trust that the license working 
group will have discussed, or will be discussing, these fringe cases and 
come to a decision about them and publish that.

But again, in general the sequence of changes to an object does not 
matter; whether you were the last person to edit the object or someone 
else edited it after you does not change the fact that you are one of 
the copyright holders and have to be asked about the license change.

Bye
Frederik

[*] I have very limited patience with people discounting the concept of 
PD just because it doesn't fit in with the legal reality in their 
respective jurisdiction. Replace PD by CC0 or any long-winded phrase 
that basically says that the author doesn't care if that makes you 
happy; I'm also very fond of http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/.

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




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