Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 09:49:56PM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote: ODbL in itself has an upgrade clause, too; it allows derived databases (including of course a complete copy) to be licensed under (section 4.4) I think the upgrade clause in ODbL is sufficiently flexible for possible licence improvements without overstepping the mark. I can agree to something that is essentially an incremental upgrade, but not for an arbitrary licence switch. I have some trust (possibly baseless) that OKFN would incrementally improve the ODbL (even better if they formally state that they would only ever incrementally update the licence). However, the CTs “explicitly” give the option of a switch to an arbitrary free and open licence, which still gives the option of a licence that is fundamentally different. “Free and open”, as well as being a vague term that I doubt has any formal legal definition (please correct me if I’m wrong), does not magically make all such licences the same, as shown by the various incompatibilities between so‐called “free” or “open source” software licences. Now who exactly decides when to issue a later version of ODbL or what makes a license compatible isn't made explicit, but I think it is safe to say that an upgrade along that path would be possible with a lot less eyes watching than an upgrade under the upgrade per clause 3 of the CT! So, you advocate having two upgrade paths, including what you consider a more stealthy upgrade path, rather than just the one? I don’t see how that’s any better. Simon -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.—John Gall signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On 17/11/2010, Grant Slater openstreet...@firefishy.com wrote: On 17 November 2010 01:27, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com wrote: These people would still want everything that is used by OSM under ODbL to be re-mapped from scratch. Who are These people? Nobody I know is calling for any sort of from scratch remapping. Those who want the OSMF to have the ability to switch licenses in the future without a data loss. I thought I have heard at least a couple of people on this list arguing for this and I don't see another way it could be achieved. There was also the talk about kayakking around Australia. Cheers Regards Grant ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: Hi, On 11/17/10 04:26, Anthony wrote: They left what process? The goal of the process was not to find a license like the ODbL. The goal of the process was to address the sui generis database right within the CC framework. This is not a contradiction. I never said it was a contradiction. The ODbL could well have been the way to address data in the CC framework. It could have been, if the ODbL were acceptable to CC. But it wasn't. And it wasn't the goal of the process. I'd avoid talking specifically of the sui generis database right because that was clearly not an issue in the beginning; the issue they tried to solve was that no one understood the legal aspects of data very clearly, no one could figure out an algorithm for when copyright applied and when it didn't, and everyone wanted a solution. The solution to that problem doesn't require changing the license at all, does it? I'm not a CC insider; I have my knowledge mainly from stuff that John Wilbanks has published. The above quote is from http://blogs.nature.com/wilbanks/2007/12/ which tells a story that starts in October 2006. Thanks. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 4:40 AM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On 11/17/2010 04:25 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote: A bigger problem, in my mind, would be facilitating a fracturing of the copyleft universe. ODbL Produced Works may be BY-SA. Possibly. But if so that BY-SA doesn't extend to the underlying data, so it's rather useless. Furthermore, you can't use pre-existing BY-SA data in your Produced Work, as that would violate the BY-SA clause that You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. The point of BY-SA is that you can do whatever you want with the work, so long as you attribute and the derivative is BY-SA. If you can't reverse engineer the work to extract out the underlying data, and use that underlying data under BY-SA, then the work can't meaningfully be said to be under BY-SA. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
[follow-ups to legal-talk, where this thread really should have started] Kevin Peat wrote: Personally I don't care if the current license is weak as most organisations will respect its spirit and if a few don't who cares, it doesn't devalue our efforts one cent. I can't see how changing to an unproven license can possibly be worth fragmenting the project. There'll be some fragmentation whatever happens. I've no doubt that, as you suggest, some people will leave if OSM moves to ODbL. Conversely, if OSM resolved to stick with CC-BY-SA then I'd leave as would several others. There is no let's just carry on as at present option. Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
But isn't the bit that's causing the bulk of the discussion a limited part of the CTs, not ODbL per se? It strikes me as two issues - changing to ODbL and, separately, the inclusion of a clause in the CTs allowing a future unspecified relicensing by the OSMF. The two aren't, necessarily, interlinked. I haven't heard any fundamental objection to moving to ODbL, but lots of objections to the CTs. Unfortunately the two seem to be being treated as one. Kevin --Original Message-- From: Richard Fairhurst Sender: legal-talk-boun...@openstreetmap.org To: t...@openstreetmap.org Cc: legal-talk@openstreetmap.org ReplyTo: Licensing and other legal discussions. Sent: 16 Nov 2010 10:45 Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change [follow-ups to legal-talk, where this thread really should have started] Kevin Peat wrote: Personally I don't care if the current license is weak as most organisations will respect its spirit and if a few don't who cares, it doesn't devalue our efforts one cent. I can't see how changing to an unproven license can possibly be worth fragmenting the project. There'll be some fragmentation whatever happens. I've no doubt that, as you suggest, some people will leave if OSM moves to ODbL. Conversely, if OSM resolved to stick with CC-BY-SA then I'd leave as would several others. There is no let's just carry on as at present option. Richard ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 6:23 AM, ke...@cordina.org.uk wrote: It strikes me as two issues - changing to ODbL and, separately, the inclusion of a clause in the CTs allowing a future unspecified relicensing by the OSMF. The two aren't, necessarily, interlinked. And for some reason the part about the DbCL gets swept under the rug and ignored. The clause in the CTs which is now causing so much trouble is: You hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the work through multiple tiers of sublicensees. And yet the DbCL, which isn't even mentioned, contains a clause which reads: The Licensor grants to You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable copyright license to do any act that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the work. I haven't heard any fundamental objection to moving to ODbL ODbL does have a couple fundamental flaws compared to CC-BY-SA. It requires distribution of the underlying database when distributing a work produced from the database, and it allows proprietary maps to be produced from ODbL databases. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
The difference in my mind between the CTs and the ODbL is the provision that allows the license to be changed at a later date, potentially without further approval of the license. I don't believe this in ODbL. Without getting into any consideration of the need for the clause, my purely legal concern is that this is a hugely broad rights grant and it's far from clear to me how any data, other than completely newly sourced and never before licenced can comply with it. Kevin Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device -Original Message- From: Anthony o...@inbox.org Sender: dipie...@gmail.com Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:33:02 To: ke...@cordina.org.uk; Licensing and other legal discussions.legal-talk@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 6:23 AM, ke...@cordina.org.uk wrote: It strikes me as two issues - changing to ODbL and, separately, the inclusion of a clause in the CTs allowing a future unspecified relicensing by the OSMF. The two aren't, necessarily, interlinked. And for some reason the part about the DbCL gets swept under the rug and ignored. The clause in the CTs which is now causing so much trouble is: You hereby grant to OSMF a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the work through multiple tiers of sublicensees. And yet the DbCL, which isn't even mentioned, contains a clause which reads: The Licensor grants to You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable copyright license to do any act that is restricted by copyright over anything within the Contents, whether in the original medium or any other. These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavour. These rights include, without limitation, the right to sublicense the work. I haven't heard any fundamental objection to moving to ODbL ODbL does have a couple fundamental flaws compared to CC-BY-SA. It requires distribution of the underlying database when distributing a work produced from the database, and it allows proprietary maps to be produced from ODbL databases. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
Kevin, ke...@cordina.org.uk wrote: The difference in my mind between the CTs and the ODbL is the provision that allows the license to be changed at a later date, potentially without further approval of the license. I don't believe this in ODbL. The CT allow the changeover to any other free and open license under the conditions that (clause 3) * the OSMF decides to do it * a 2/3 majority of active mappers are in favour. That's quite a lot of further approval I should think. ODbL in itself has an upgrade clause, too; it allows derived databases (including of course a complete copy) to be licensed under (section 4.4) * ODbL 1.0, * a later version of ODbL similar in spirit to ODbL 1.0, * a license compatible to ODbL 1.0. Now who exactly decides when to issue a later version of ODbL or what makes a license compatible isn't made explicit, but I think it is safe to say that an upgrade along that path would be possible with a lot less eyes watching than an upgrade under the upgrade per clause 3 of the CT! Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
Hi, Rob Myers wrote: As does OSM's existing CC-BY-SA 2.0 licence. I believe such an upgrade path was how Wikipedia changed from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, wasn't it? They got the makers of GFDL to release a newer version of GFDL that would provide an upgrade window. If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical CC-BY-SA 3.1; alas they had their own plans (and saying to them You guys have more money than God, and I think you want to own this space, and I think you're trying to stop dissent from your Vision. when they popped up here to discuss probably didn't help). Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On 11/16/2010 10:08 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote: Hi, Rob Myers wrote: As does OSM's existing CC-BY-SA 2.0 licence. I believe such an upgrade path was how Wikipedia changed from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, wasn't it? They got the makers of GFDL to release a newer version of GFDL that would provide an upgrade window. It was a different upgrade path from the one in BY-SA but basically yes. BY-SA 2.0 and above state that you can relicence derivatives (adaptations) under a later licence or a licence from a different jurisdiction: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode 4.b: You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this License, a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License, or a Creative Commons iCommons license that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Japan) With Wikipedia, the FSF released a special point version of the FDL that would allow large wiki projects (hint, hint ;-) ) to vote to relicence to BY-SA for a limited time period. If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical Sure. It might still be worth asking them about this if people haven't already. - Rob. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical CC-BY-SA 3.1 If Creative Commons wanted to support the export of sui generis database protection, there wouldn't have been a need for ODbL in the first place. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
Hi, Anthony wrote: If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical CC-BY-SA 3.1 If Creative Commons wanted to support the export of sui generis database protection, there wouldn't have been a need for ODbL in the first place. It was Creative Commons who started the process of looking for a license that led to ODbL. It's just that Creative Commons left that process along the way. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On 16 November 2010 23:08, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical CC-BY-SA 3.1; They could probably make ODbL a compatible license but that wouldn't satisfy those wanting the ability to upgrade to another free and open license, let alone all the rights granted in the current Contributor Terms. These people would still want everything that is used by OSM under ODbL to be re-mapped from scratch. Of course Creative Commons could in theory make PDDL a compatible license, or something else that supposedly satisfies the CT, but that would hurt so many other projects, authors, artists, who used a CC license. Cheers ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Anthony o...@inbox.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: Hi, Anthony wrote: If Creative Commons had been more friendly towards the data licensing issue, a similar window could have been opened in a hypothetical CC-BY-SA 3.1 If Creative Commons wanted to support the export of sui generis database protection, there wouldn't have been a need for ODbL in the first place. It was Creative Commons who started the process of looking for a license that led to ODbL. It's just that Creative Commons left that process along the way. They left what process? The goal of the process was not to find a license like the ODbL. The goal of the process was to address the sui generis database right within the CC framework. CC chose to address the right by including it in the definition of work and unconditionally waiving it. They did this because including the right otherwise might have the effect of exporting sui generis database protection to countries without it. It's a little more complicated than that. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, the one that most people use, is silent on sui generis restrictions. I don't believe they were seriously discussed (this would have been ~late 2006), but I haven't reviewed 3.0 discussions in a long time. There was a policy decision (summer 2007) to waive license requirements for sui generis restrictions in EU ports of 3.0, effectively conditional on compliance with the license requirements, unless there's a work in which only sui generis, not copyright, applies. I realize this is confusing, as well as the possibility that I'm confused. I work for CC at present, but am not a lawyer, just wanted to mention it is fairly nuanced, and note that CC is watching this and other data[base] discussions. In the fullness of time we'll begin planning for 4.0, and I believe it will be incumbent on CC to review how all of the difficult issues are addressed, not limited to sui generis, moral right^w^wimmoral restrictions ;-), scope of derivatives and noncommercial (obviously irrelevant here), porting, etc, etc. The folks at ODC took the exact opposite position, and created a license for the explicit purpose of trying to export the sui generis database right to countries which did not have it. On this issue I actually think CC-BY-SA made the wrong decision, and that they should have allowed the sui generis database right to be exported (in the updated version of CC-BY-SA). I'd hope for something between exporting bad policy and not dealing effectively with it (what are public copyright licenses but an attempt to deal effectively with bad policy!?), but I'm sure it is difficult. This would have made the ODbL unnecessary, at least for OSM's purposes, and would have not opened the door to all the *other* changes that came along with the addition of the sui generis database right (i.e. the ability to make proprietary maps from OSM data, the requirement to offer the Derivative Database or an alteration file along with Produced Works, the DbCL, the contributor terms, incompatibility with Nearmap, data loss, etc.) But regardless of whether they were right or wrong, I can't imagine them supporting the sui generis database right on one hand (by facilitating OSM's switch to a license which relies on it), and refusing to support it on the other (by only recognizing the right in their licenses long enough to waive it). A bigger problem, in my mind, would be facilitating a fracturing of the copyleft universe. I realize that there's an argument that data and content are separate magisteria, but I'm pretty skeptical. Non-offi(cc)iously, Mike -- https://creativecommons.net/ml ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [talk] New site about the license change
Hi, On 11/17/10 04:26, Anthony wrote: They left what process? The goal of the process was not to find a license like the ODbL. The goal of the process was to address the sui generis database right within the CC framework. This is not a contradiction. The ODbL could well have been the way to address data in the CC framework. I'd avoid talking specifically of the sui generis database right because that was clearly not an issue in the beginning; the issue they tried to solve was that no one understood the legal aspects of data very clearly, no one could figure out an algorithm for when copyright applied and when it didn't, and everyone wanted a solution. I'm not a CC insider; I have my knowledge mainly from stuff that John Wilbanks has published. The above quote is from http://blogs.nature.com/wilbanks/2007/12/ which tells a story that starts in October 2006. Bye Frederik ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
