Hi, Gervase Markham wrote: > So what can be done? I agree that reverse engineering is a risk. Life is > not perfect. But still, my suggestion is that we should abandon the idea > of trying to prevent reverse engineering, for the following reasons: > > a) GPL and CC-BY-SA compatibility of produced works is more important. > > b) If people are reverse-engineering our stuff, either they need a > massive, sustained, continuous Mechanical Turk effort, or their map will > be out of date anyway.
I agree with both points, but I would like to try and be pragmatic: Don't throw out the reverse engineering clause; just add a clause that explicitly permits releasing Produced Works under a number of named share-alike licenses. I think this gives us the best mix. Reverse engineering will be possible, but only from share-alike licensed Produced Works. This makes it impossible to create an "all rights reserved" produced work and reverse engineer from that; any reverse engineering will be through a share-alike licensed work, and the resulting database will by protected by the share-alike license in question. This means one of two things: (1) If you are of the opinion that copyright does not work for OSM data anyway and only database/contract law can protect it, then the reverse engineering will release OSM from clutch of the database right and into the fully unrestricted world. In this case, our situation is not *better* than today but it is not worse either. (2) If you are of the opinion that copyright does indeed work for OSM data then the reverse engineering amounts to a conversion from one share-alike type of license to another, which is no big deal. Anyone driving a reverse-engineering effort wold have to invest a lot of money and in the end all he gets is (at best) an OSM dataset licensed exactly as it is today. Great win! See also: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Suggested_Changes#Possible_solution_.231:_Explicitly_allow_popular_SA_licenses Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
