[OSM-talk] Terminate Facebook rights under ODbL (Andy Mabbett )

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 9. Jun 2019, at 15:45, Nuno Caldeira <nunocapelocaldeira at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As mentioned on the blog, i already asked facebook several times to comply. They stopped replying. I'm not expecting a reply, i'm just sharing this on the mailing list.


I guess you are expecting a reply from the OpenStreetMap-Foundation
board of directors or them publicly taking a position? Because this is
the n+1th time that unsatisfactory attribution (or completely missing
in the case of mini maps) by Facebook is raised here, and AFAIR there
was never an official statement by the board (members of the board may
have replied individually and with personal statements). I would
really welcome a clear statement from board, or at least one that
explains that board members have different opinions on this, or why it
takes them so long to say anything about it.

People have contributed to OSM under the Contributor Terms, where OSMF
acknowledged they would only distribute the data under the ODbL or
another free and open license chosen by the active contributors. Not
pursuing license violations (and not even attempting to do anything
against it) is against the spirit of the whole license idea and raises
questions about the validity of the Contributor Terms agreement.

As you have cited, for the abusers the situation is defined in the
license text, "9.0 Termination of Your rights under this License", and
by using the OSM data without attribution (as confirmed also by
Facebook in the email you have shared), their license is already
terminated, no notification necessary ("9.1 Any breach by You of the
terms and conditions of this License automatically terminates this
License with immediate effect and without notice to You.").
On the other hand, I believe most of us are not interested in
terminating the use of our data by them, we are happy for everyone
using it, it is the purpose of the project to create useful data. What
we want is simply the required attribution. Noone can use a
substantial part of the db without giving attribution.

In some way it is also in the interest of any of our data users that
there is attribution to OSM, because if the OSM community grows, it
will result in more accurate and up to date map data.

Cheers,
Martin