[OSM-talk] Getting legal advice

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

I think the debate about licensing exposes a big problem: the OSMF needs to 
seek proper legal advice on various questions that underlie the debate. 
Without proper legal advice we're left with "IANAL" qualifications and 
counterproductive attempts to draft our own license [1].

Here are some questions we might pose:

1 - Can one copyright geodata?
2 - Can one copyright maps? [2] [3]
3 - How would we draft a legally watertight "public domain" waiver? [4]
4 - What constitutes a derivative work? We could check a number of examples.

Without doing this, I fear that the OSMF will make a very hasty and 
potentially damaging choice with respect to licensing. These things have a 
habit of biting you in the arse five years down the line, so it would be much 
better to do this properly now rather than further compound any problems. 

With legal advice under our belt, we can have an informed debate about the 
merits of different licenses and waivers.


Of course this raises a big question: how can the OSMF get this? Two options:

1 - Does anyone know of someone who would do it pro bono?
2 - If not, can we fundraise for this?


Regards,
Tom


[1] The mere fact that people have reservations about the enforceability and 
clarity of Creative Commons licenses, drafted and checked by a significant 
number of lawyers, suggests we'd be stupid, stupid, stupid to attempt this 
ourselves. The talk about the difference between creative works and maps 
underlines our ignorance on this list - in copyright legislation there's no 
such distinction, and making one could both be legally uncertain and could 
turn OSM into a mapping ghetto cut off from other creative endeavours.

[2] There is a lot of evidence on the web to suggest we can, but it's worth 
being sure. For example: http://ahds.ac.uk/copyrightfaq.htm?#faq41

[3] Also, this is the key question for me. There's been a lot of talk about 
OSM principally producing geodata, but I'm sure the vast majority of OSM 
contributors think of it as a mapping project, as the name suggests.

[4] As I and others have said, there's no way you can put your work into the 
public domain. In UK law there's no such thing as a public domain. To be a PD 
project we'd need to draft a decent waiver that says "do as you like, even 
though it's copyrighted".

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