Hello OSMF Legal Team,

due to a quite troubling revelation by @SomeoneElse that changeset comments are
automatically republished by the third party private company Slack, I would
appreciate if you could share your legal assessment of this situation. More
specifically, what is the copyright status of changeset comments and which OSMF
document or agreement covers changeset comments?

As far as I can tell no document covers changeset comments either explicitly nor
implicitly. The Contributor Terms state that “…contributing data and/or any
other content (collectively, “Contents”) to the geo-database of the
OpenStreetMap project (the “Project”)” is explicitly limited to contributions to
the geo-database (map database). As far as I can tell changeset comments are not
part of the OSM's geo-database. Changeset comments themselves do not contain any
geo-data, they merely reference a changeset. The changeset contains geo-data and
is what actually becomes part of the geo-database. Thus naturally changesets are
covered by the Contributor Terms but not changeset comments. Consequently, it
should be fair to assume that the copyright to changeset comments remains with
their respective authors. However, since changeset comments are apparently
neither explicitly nor implicitly covered by any agreement or license, it should
be also fair to assume that by the act of creating comments on OSM's website
commentators do grant copyright to the OSMF, though limited in scope. It is fair
to assume that the scope is limited to the production or quality assurance of
the map. I think that given this situation it should be very difficult to argue
that commentators implicitly grant copyright to any other party than the OSMF,
publish comments into the public domain, or for any extended purpose.

Anyhow, imho either way it would not be wise—today's more fashionable word here
would be “smart”—for the OSMF to grant changeset comment copyright to others.
There are many good reasons why this should not happen. Just for one, changeset
comments are not part OSMF's /product/, yet they are still publicly available
and thus enable full transparency. So, there is really no need for others to
reproduce them, especially for profit.

Regards
GITNE

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