On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> wrote: > Tom Hughes <t...@...> writes: > >>>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. > >>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. > > That is certainly a good reason to switch to a simpler and legally > unambiguous licence. Have these same lawyers reviewed the ODBL and given > it the thumbs up?
several lawyers have looked at ODbL and commented. some have posted their views publicly http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License#ODbL_reviews_from_lawyers there is an open letter requesting comment out at the moment, but we have so far not received any publishable responses. you say simpler and legally unambiguous, but it's become clear to me from my work on the LWG that it is impossible for something to be simple, unambiguous and global in scope. copyright law is sort-of harmonised across the world by the Berne, Buenos Aires and Universal Copyright Conventions, which makes it easier to write licenses based on copyrights. there's just nothing like that for mostly factual databases yet. > (It would also be a good reason to dual-license the OSM content both under > Creative Commons and under a somehow more friendly licence. As a rationale > for dropping CC altogether it makes less sense.) here is my rationale for moving away from CC BY-SA http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Unsuitable in short: 1) it probably doesn't protect factual (or mostly-factual) data like OSM in most of the world 2) it is very hard to use in conjunction with other datasets, as it doesn't define derivative very well 3) the "share-alike" provision applies to the work, not the database 4) it is unclear how to attribute a large project like OSM not all of these issues are fully solved by ODbL - but it's a step in the right direction. cheers, matt _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
