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 _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
