[OSM-talk] CC0 in UK, CC0 in USA, sui generis database right and Wikidata

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Sun Nov 5 20:29:21 UTC 2017


Maybe I need to expand a bit, this was discussed early on when WD first
became available, and is just a rehash of that.

Essentially it boils down to

- the WMF only licences ".. all of Affirmer's Copyright and Related
Rights and..." on CC0 terms (CC0 2.), in other words their rights

- and doesn't warrant that the Work is free of third party rights (CC0 4.c)

See https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode for the
text.

You will find similar provisions in many public licenses.

In general when we are using third party data in OSM the onus is on us
to do enough due diligence to determine the provenance of the data and
if it is actually possible to use it on the terms presented. Depending
on the source this may be reasonably easy to do with a high degree of
confidence, in other cases it may not (an infamous case was part of the
downfall of openaddresses.uk). 

Now while in principle the same applies to somebody using OSM data, we
(OSM) invest a lot of effort in ensuring that any third party data can
actually be distributed on our licence terms (and that includes shying
away from anything that could cause issues). So while we are clearly not
perfect, we are a lot lot better than essentially any other project in
the same space.

Back to WD: as pointed about above, the issue is not that the WMF is
claiming that WD can be used on CC0 terms when it couldn't be, aka
laundering the data (quite to the contrary), it is that because  we
would need to vet the provenance of the data (because it is obviously
from a large variety of non-declared sources) and that is a non-starter.

Simon

Am 05.11.2017 um 20:36 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny:
> On Sun, 5 Nov 2017 10:28:29 -0800
> Mark Wagner <mark+osm at carnildo.com> wrote:
>
>> Not an issue.  The CC0 license explicitly calls out database rights as
>> being released to the greatest extent possible.  From the text of the
>> license (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode)
> What about cases where:
>
> 1) there is database from say UK, protected under database rights
> 2) imported into Wikidata (AFAIK in compliance with USA laws)
> 3) described by Wikidata as CC0
>
> 1) coordinates are copied from for example Google Maps into Wikipedia
> (it is accepted and encouraged on Wikipedia as AFAIK it is not against
> USA law)
> 2) imported into Wikidata (done on a massive scale, significant part
> of Wikidata is mass scale copying of facts justified by "facts are not
> copyrighted")
> 3) described by Wikidata as CC0
>
> I am quite sure that in both cases Wikidata contains data not usable in
> EU/UK (and the same time it can be claimed that data is CC0 - at least
> in USA it is true).
>
> Hopefully I am missing something but I am pretty sure that removing
> database rights from collection of data is not as simple as "republish
> database in USA and copy it back".
>
> If copying coordinate data from Google Maps is not OK than copying
> Wikidata coordinates (that were copied from Wikipedia, sourced to
> Google Maps) is also not OK.
>
> Note that examples above are not theoretical, especially tainted
> geotagging is problematic.
>
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