Russ Nelson <r...@...> writes: >Some of the stuff is there to help enforce the database license. If >we had a license that didn't give us the occasion to sue anybody, we >wouldn't need terms like that, but in fact we DO plan to sue SOMEBODY, >sooner or later. And it's only reasonable to then be able to say in >court "Harrrrrrrrumph, you used our website on these various >occasions; continued use implies that you did IN FACT agree to abide >by our distribution license." You can argue whether the terms are >effective, but you can't argue against their existence in principle.
Actually, I do find their existence in principle deeply troubling. The licence should not try to impose additional restrictions on people beyond their own country's copyright law (and other applicable laws such as database right). I think the GPL has the right model to follow: 'You do not have to accept this License, since you have not signed it.' Going down the road of a click-through EULA, which tries to impose additional restrictions and take away rights you had before, is not the right direction for a free data project such as OSM. I think that hypothetical legal scenarios (of how to let our lawyers best attack bad people) are far less important than maintaining an unambiguously free set of map data, respecting the rights of users and contributors, and not tangling the project up in pages of forbidding legalese. So I think such terms, whether 'effective' or not in making it easier to sue people, would certainly be effective in discouraging contributions to OSM. -- Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
