On 27/10/09 11:04, Ed Avis wrote: > Frederik Ramm<frede...@...> writes: > >>> Again, is there any evidence (rather than just repetition of the same >>> opinions) that in some country, OSM data is effectively in the public >>> domain? >> >> If your question is: "Has anybody ever used OSM data without regard to >> the CC-BY-SA license, been sued, and lost" then the answer is, to my >> knowledge, no. > > That would be needed to prove that CC-BY-SA is effective in some country. > But I feel that the burden of proof is the other way around. If you suggest > dropping the existing licence and moving to a much more complicated new one, > you need to show good evidence that the current licence is not working. > When I look around I see a thriving OSM project, with no evidence that the > current CC-BY-SA licence has held back people from contributing or led to > leechers distributing their own OSM-derived data under unfree terms. > (That said, there are some cases where the ODBL is more permissive, since > AFAIK > it allows rendered map images to be distributed under the terms you want.)
You've enumerated two possible failures modes for the current license but ignored one important one - whether people are being put off reusing our data because of uncertainty over the license. We know for a fact that a number of people (especially people that have asked their lawyers for an opinion) have indeed decided not to use our data for this reason. >> The contract approach is primarily there because many believe the US to >> be such a country. > > That might be so, but again, I really doubt you can copy maps with impunity, > otherwise we would be copying street names from Google. Ignoring the contract restrictions Google impose via their terms of use you mean? You see, other people do think contracts are needed ;-) Yes, I know that the whole question of whether those terms are binding in contract law given the lack of explicit acceptance is an open one but it certainly hasn't stopped them trying. Tom -- Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu) http://www.compton.nu/ _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
