[OSM-talk] An example of the complications inherent in determining tainted ways

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 12/15/2011 02:11 PM, 80n wrote:
> Joint ownership is an important principle to understand.  If someone
> edits a way then they are making a derivative of that way and inheriting
> *all* of the joint copyright ownerships.

Provided that a way is a work - maybe it isn't; maybe the whole of OSM 
is "the work"?

> Even if their changes are to
> remove the effect of a change by one of the previous contributors it
> does not, as far as I know, delete that contributors copyright.

In some national versions of "joint authorship", while the joint authors 
all have a share in the copyright, they do not have the power to veto 
the use (and sublicensing) of the work by the other authors. This is an 
important principle to understand.

> If this is true, then the only way to disinfect a tainted way is to
> revert back to the version prior to the infection and applying
> subsequent changes to that version.  Simply negating changes does not
> delete copyright ownership because the ownership extends to the whole work.

It sounds like an utterly stupid thing to do but if we now re-set 
objects to an earlier state by negating changes and later somebody finds 
out that we would have had to follow your above procedure instead, then 
that can still be done - automatically. So I'd not waste much thought on 
this right now; we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Bye
Frederik