Hi, TimSC wrote:
Richard and Frederik observed that a database right is probably owned by someone and that someone might be (partly) OSMF.
By the way, the database right exists - in certain jurisdictions like the EU - even if it is not asserted. That means, OSMF is likely to hold database rights over the database even today. But CC-BY-SA says nothing about granting somebody use of the database.
This means, and I'm not making this up, that some potential users have received legal advice against using OSM at this time because they percieve OSM to be protected by database law, and at the same time there's no license allowing you to use it under database law. Being allowed to use it from a copyright perspective, as done by CC-BY-SA, is not enough in the eyes of these lawyers.
Some localized versions of the CC-BY-SA were amended to include database law but insecurity remains about if and how that applies to OSM.
The problem has been addressed properly only in CC-BY-SA 3.0 (see http://wiki.creativecommons.org:8080/images/f/f6/V3_Database_Rights.pdf).
> They were relatively optimistic that OSMF is nice and would not
assert their rights, if any. Matija Nalis pointed out this is no guide to their future behavior.
In this context, it is perhaps important to note that courts are not computers, and legal code is not program code. Just because it could be logically constructed that you cannot get your own contribution back without agreement, doesn't mean a judge will sign that off.
We should also get an official statement from OSMF that they will not assert their database rights on our contributions.
Of course if OSMF were to say that they don't assert database right on any contribution made by PD people then that would be great. I am not sure if it is possible legally though, because the very nature of database right is to protect the whole database - once you deal with database right you don't deal with individual contributions or data items any more.
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
