[OSM-talk] How to start to remove non-CT compliant data..

[Robert Whittaker (OSM)]

On 3 September 2011 05:03, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> The first is a contract of adhesion: "Here's my
> work; I renounce any copyright claims over it." The OSMF has the
> choice of accepting that contract or rejecting it, just as it does the
> contract formed by agreeing to the Contributor Terms. I don't
> understand their choice of accepting the one contract but refusing the
> other.

But "Here's my work; I renounce any copyright claims over it." doesn't
go as far as the contributor terms do. One would also need to add
something along the lines of "And I'm reasonably sure that no-one else
has any copyright claims over my contributions that would prevent OSMF
re-distributing them under the relevant licenses."

This ambiguity is presumably at least one of the reasons why LWG don't
feel they're able to accept arbitrary PD declarations. Personally, I'd
like to see them produce a simple boilerplate PD declaration that does
cover everything they want it to, and then allow people to agree to
that somehow. It would, however, need to be a wider rights grant than
in the Contributor Terms (since those are the minimum rights that LWG
feel they need). But from what I've read I think it could be worded so
as to get around the objections that the PD advocates have been
raising.

-- 
Robert Whittaker