Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote: > It's been proposed by me several times in the past. I think it's > essential. I don't know of a similar major project that doesn't do some > kind of assignment. Wikipedia is the nearest, but Wikipedia is a > collection of articles that all stand on their own.
Can you name some which do? > We need a situation where someone can say "Yes" when an enquiry comes > in, not "hire a lawyer to look at license XYZ". Otherwise the data is > useless for many purposes that everyone would agree it should be allowed > for. But surely a license is a codification of "what everyone agrees it should be allowed for"? > For example, a while ago, ITN news needed a map of Baghdad. No one could > say for sure how much of the TV buletin they would have to release > CC-by-sa in order to allow them to do that. Looking back at that now, > probably "only" the final ITN styled bitmap image that is shown on the > screen, but the designers of ITN's style guidelines probably haven't > licensed ITN to release them. > > If the foundation owned the data, they could say to ITN "just show a > logo and www.openstreetmap.org in the corner at some point", and > everyone would be happy. As I understand it, the new licence solves this problem. > Another example: it would be great if an npemap type system could be > used with OSM maps to derive a free postcode database, but license > incompatibilities make that impossible. This is insane. (Define "free".) You may think so. Other contributors may think it's entirely reasonable for postcode data calculated using OSM to be BY-SA rather than PD. > Obviously if > that went to any kind of vote, the foundation would allow that, but they > don't currently have the power to allow it. It would certainly be interesting to look at whether the licence change would have any effect on the postcode problem. > Yes, maybe you can come up with a license that would unambiguously allow > the above two uses, but there will be cases where it will be in OSM's > interests to bend the rules, and we must provide a mechanism that allows > this. There are negative sides to a copyright assignment. A) We probably wouldn't get one from e.g. AND or MASSGIS (although I'm speculating). B) It would mean the scenario I mentioned to Frederik, where a commercial company could sue a license violator, couldn't happen, because they would no longer be the copyright holder. Gerv _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
