Yup, I said this: "I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is already unprotected [under CC-BY-SA], and you cannot slap a license on it and protect it. ... That means I'm free to ignore any kind of share-alike you apply to your data. I've got a download of the OSM data dump. I can repost it, right now, as public domain."
Said Matt Amos: very probably that wasn't the official creative commons line, and he wasn't a lawyer, but neither have i seen his comments officially refuted by anyone at CC.
Nope, wasn't an "official line". It was a point about how easy it is to extract and republish data if you want do do so, because of the inexact reaches of copyright, database rights, and contract. The point was to be provocative, not to make a threat.
I'm not ever going to republish a copy of the OSM data dump, because that would be an asshole maneuver (which, as an American, is I believe the King's English phrasing). But someone who didn't care about being an asshole could do so, and the remedies are a lot less clear than they are in software and culture. If the asshole isn't in the EU, and didn't get a copy under contract, what do you do? That was my point - to make people think about that.
CC also isn't Science Commons. We got absorbed last year by CC, and CC's a lot more about providing choices, not about being normative. Our job at SC was to be normative, to push for more open uses of the tools inside the CC suite of tools. That's why we didn't *recommend* the use of the licenses on data in the sciences, and I was kind of naive in jumping over into your community and yelling about those terms here.
I apologize for that. This isn't a science community. It's not publicly funded. And I'm not part of it. I shouldn't have gotten onto the list and ranted without spending time getting to know the community. Indeed, i've done a little mapping since then even.
So I backed out, and let you guys hash it out, and I worked out my differences with OKF via the Panton Principles (http://pantonprinciples.org)- public science data should be in the public domain - while I let CC take over the conversation about data licensing generally.
I remain an advocate for the public domain for data, and a skeptic as to the ability to magically port the tools of free culture and free software to free data. But I'm a lot less stressed about it than I used to be. Part of that is that the capacity to create data is so great - data that doesn't get licensed well won't get well used, whatever the tools chosen - and part of that is the result of talking to a lot more people who are in open data outside the sciences.
Keep on posting old text that I cited, as I won't run from my own words. We all own what we say on lists. As I said, I shouldn't have gotten on here and posted so rashly, but it is what it is.
But also keep watching the CC site and blog for information, because CC is the only one that speaks for CC. Science Commons ain't the voice of CC for data, and never was, and it's our collective fault in both parts of the organization that we allowed that to happen (as Mike Linksvayer pointed out in a post earlier this year at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26283).
Back to lurking. jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science Creative Commons web: http://creativecommons.org/science blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge twitter: @wilbanks _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
