Hi,
with my eyes firmly on the upcoming license change, I wonder how we
are going to deal with people who have imported data which is suitable
from a license point of view, but whom we cannot reach or who do not
agree to the CT.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that Dave Hansen (who ran the
TIGER import) wouldn't agree to the CT. I know he has agreed already,
I'm just using this as a what-if example.
The original TIGER data is PD, so there's no license problem with
keeping it. But Dave certainly has invested a lot of time in planning
and executing the import, and he has certainly created copyrightable
software in the process, thinking of how to match features in the
original data to OSM tags and so on.
We know that facts are very unlikely to be protected by CC-BY-SA in the
US, no matter how many times you convert them into something else, but
let's assume for a moment that Dave was operating out of Europe.
Would his act of converting and uploading public domain data to OSM give
him rights in that data, so that we'd have to remove it if he does not
agree to the CT? Or do we say "PD data is PD data, no matter what the
person uploading it to OSM says"?
It may be even easier to think about this if one splits the process into
two steps - person A masterfully creates a piece of data conversion
software, then person B installs that software, grabs a PD dataset, and
hits a button on the software. Who "owns" the resulting data in OSM? A,
who devised the algorithms? B, who pushed the button and used his
computing time and network bandwidth? Both? Neither?
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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