[OSM-talk] License

[Lester Caine]

Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:
> Lester Caine wrote:
>> Nic Roets wrote:
>>> My 2 cents :
>>>
>>> To me it makes no difference weather I contribute to a CC / GPL
>>> project, or weather I contribute to a PD project with a good
>>> non-profit orginization (NPO) behind it :
>>>
>>> If someone then sells a relicensed version of my PD work, that's fine
>>> because, in the internet era, his clients will be just one or two
>>> websearches away from discovering the true magnitude of his
>>> contribution.
>> If only that was the case :(
>> You obviously have not heard about the current case relating to a 
>> company selling reworked PD material as their own work and trying to 
>> extract licence fees from the people who actually created it !
>> http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html
>> If the company win, then the licence covering such little projects as 
>> Perl are not worth the disk space they are stored on.
>>
>> So lets take care that a commercial hijack does not take place here!
> 
> That's an interesting case, but it mostly refers to patents, not
> copyright and I don't see how it's relevant here.

Robert - you need to check out the current situation in court! One of 
the Purl team is on the list of witnesses since the court may well rule 
that the licence COVERING copyright does not prevent people using that 
information of their own commercial purposes. The patent issue started 
it, but the defence that the patent is invalid relates to the fact that 
the information used to create the commercial software was 'stolen' from 
the project, but the court are going with - You can't steal something if 
it has no value - i.e. it's free to use even if the licence prevent 
commercial exploitation. The current rulings in court could mean that 
anybody can sell public domain data ( going on to then PATENT it is just 
an American prerogative )

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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