[OSM-talk] What could we do to make this licences discussion more inclusive?

[Anthony]

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 2:39 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> We now know that anybody, at least in most jurisdictions and if he has a
> decent-sized legal budget and has not respect for ethics (i.e. is
> sufficiently evil), can effectively use our data as if it were unprotected.
> In other words, we were wrong, we chose the wrong license out of ignorance.
> Shit happens.
>

I'm going to reiterate the point I made above in another way.  However, I'd
first like to point out that I disagree that it is "evil" or constitutes a
lack or respect for ethics for someone to use non-copyrightable facts as
though they are not copyrighted.

Now, with that out of the way, let's say a big huge company with lots of map
data and a decent-sized legal budget decides to use OSM data as though it
were not copyrighted.  Presumably they'd try to do this without getting
caught, but let's further say that they do get caught.  Now what?  Now we
sue them and they have to argue in court that geodata is ineligible for
copyright?  Yeah right.  That means their competitors can now come along and
take all of *their* data, and there's nothing at all that they can do about
it.

Seems incredibly unlikely to me.
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