Hello Kathleen, thank you for your clarifications.
On 09/23/2020 at 02:42 PM Kathleen Lu via legal-talk wrote:
GITNE, I don't know what distinction you are drawing between opinion and legal assessment. I cannot give you legal advice as I am not your lawyer, but my legal opinion, based on the terms of the Contributor Agreement, is that changeset comments are part of OSM's geo-database.
What I meant by legal assessment is that I would like to know what OSMF's layers think of this. I would assume that the OSMF has some sort of legal department, like the people who have drafted some of the fundamental legal documents (like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Contributor Terms, ODbL etc) regulating some aspects of OSMF's operations.
Note that the terms say: "OSMF agrees that it may only use or sub-license Your Contents as part of a database and only under the terms of one or more of the following licences:.." So if changeset comments did not count as part of the geo-database, OSM would not have rights to use them, which would be contrary to the purposes of the Contributor Terms.
I read it that OSMF will only ever use or sub-license content as a database (or part of). In other words, it is about the way or how OSM uses, handles, or redistributes (sub-licenses) content. Specifically, in a database. Sub-licensing means here that only specific licenses will be chosen, like the ODbL 1.0, DbCL 1.0, or CC-BY-SA 2.0, when redistributing content as a database. This provision does not qualify content. The first sentence of 1.2.4 does. Aside from that, I do not think you can assume or reason sort of backwards: Because the definition missed out on something we will reason from the application of the definition to what the definition was supposed to include. So, it is absolutely feasible that the Contributor Terms may lack something. Legal documents, laws, and regulations are not perfect. Nothing is. And, it is nothing to be ashamed of if anyone spots a loophole or gap in a legal document or regulation. It is an opportunity for improvement. The Contributor Terms have been drafted when OpenStreetMap was developing and was accepting not much more than map data contributions. So, it was sufficient to handle geo-database contributions only. Since then, OpenStreetMap has grown, new functionality and tools have been added. Perhaps OpenStreetMap's progress has outpaced its legal framework? Or maybe the legal framework did not keep up with OpenStreetMap's progress? I do not know. What I do know, is that “Content” is limited in scope to geo-database contributions in the Contributor Terms. Regards GITNE
On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 5:34 AM Eugene Alvin Villar <sea...@gmail.com <mailto:sea...@gmail.com>> wrote: On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:19 PM Andy Townsend <ajt1...@gmail.com <mailto:ajt1...@gmail.com>> wrote: For those unfamiliar with it, the OSM US' Slack instance has a "feed-changeset-comments" channel which shows new changeset discussion comments shortly after they are added. There are lots of other ways of getting at that data as well of course - including on osm.org <http://osm.org> itself. To provide some context, this Slack channel is simply forwarding the contents of an Atom feed generated by Pascal Neis here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=United States IANAL, but from an intellectual property point of view, I think Pascal creating RSS/Atom feeds of changeset comments per country falls under fair use/fair dealing. And there is a whole ecosystem of tools that process and consume RSS/Atom feeds, one of which is an integration in Slack was setup by someone so that comments on changesets in the United States are more visible to the people who are in the OSM US Slack. ~Eugene
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