[OSM-talk] open data

[Tom Chance]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 11:33, Nick Burch wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Paul Dixon wrote:
> >> Who here would be prepared to unilaterally relicense their data under
> >> CC-BY (not SA)?
> >
> > I intend to dedicate my tracklogs and ways edited by me to the public
> > domain, but I'd be happy to contribute to OSM under a CC-BY licence.

Just FYI - and this is a hotly contested legal area - it's probably impossible 
to dedicate your work to the public domain in many countries. In continental 
Europe it is almost certainly not possible, in the US and countries with 
similar copyright law it's debatable. In the UK there's actually no such 
thing as the public domain in law! Sources:
http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=12829
http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?query=public+domain
http://www.lr.mdx.ac.uk/copyright/COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP.htm

If you want to cede as much control as possible, use something like a CC-BY, 
BSD or MIT license, or draft your own waiver that basically says "do what you 
want with this".

Anyway, whilst I definitely prefer BY-SA I wouldn't have a hissy fit and 
withdraw my work if OSM went to BY ;-) I agree that making useful stuff is 
more important than getting projects tied up with lawyers. I also worry about 
how much of the database we'd lose in a license fork.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera