[OSM-talk] Import guidelines & OSMF/DWG governance

[Kai Krueger]

Hello,

I don't know anything about the particular import that originated this
question, and so I don't know if the following arguments specifically apply,
but I do want to comment on the issue of requiring a separate account for
imports.

IMHO, the issue is about licensing.

The contributor terms that every account has signed states "You hereby grant
to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable
licence to do any act that is restricted by copyright, database right or any
related right over anything within the Contents". This is basically the
equivalent of PD and indeed would allow OSMF to in future license the OSM
data under a PD-equivalent license (subject to well defined democratic
voting procedure described in clause 3 in the CT)

If this applied to imported data as well, this would have excluded all non
PD imports completely, which a lot of people found unacceptable. My
understand is that therefor in clause 1 of the CT the following was added
"You are indicating that, as far as You know, You have the right to
authorize OSMF to use and distribute those Contents under our current
licence terms." I.e. you are only required to check licensing compatibility
to the current license (now ODbL) and not to the stricter PD requirement.

My understanding is that this was interpreted as that all original content
of an account falls under the "PD licensing to OSMF", given the '"You"
hereby grant' part, but non-original content (i.e. imports) retain their
original licensing and can be imported  never-the-less as long as it is
compatible with the current license (but might need to be removed in future
should the license ever change again).

So there are now data in the db with different licenses, but currently no
way to distinguish between the two conditions and in the later case what
license they are actually under.

Requiring a separate account for original content for which OSMF has a
PD-equivalent license and imported data for which the license OSMF has is
not PD seems like the minimum prudent thing to do.

I would go further and actually separate these things out in the CT. I.e.
original content accounts (the normal mapper account) signs a different CT
than import accounts. The import account CT then spells out the requirements
for how to correctly do an import more clearly. Particularly that the exact
license agreement of the data under which OSM(F) can use the data now and in
future is correctly documented and recorded, e.g. as reference in case there
are any legal disputes in future.

The DWG would then have a clear mandate to block imports that don't adhere
to the then well specified "import guidelines"

Overall compared to all the effort that has to go into a prudent import,
creating a new account is minimal effort. So this requirement is hardly
unreasonable.

Kai







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