Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons

[80n]

Thinh Nguyen of Creative Commons writes:

> While some complexities are introduced by differences in background legal
> doctrines, others are introduced by the ODbL scheme itself.
>

These two points about the complexity of the ODbL are important ones that
probably haven't been discussed as much as they should have been.

As if the ODbL is not complex enough, when you add in the FIL and all the
other considerations that apply to the practical implementation within the
OSM context (eg click-through access for mirrored databases etc) then we
have something that, in my opinion, is near to being unusable.

Given that we have a goal of going from 100,000 contributors to 1 million
complexity is something that will cost the community a lot.  On my personal
list of issues complexity is one that I consider to be a show stopper.

80n

2009/3/21 Jean-Christophe Haessig 

> Le samedi 21 mars 2009 à 19:02 +0100, Ulf Möller a écrit :
> > Thinh Nguyen of Creative Commons has posted detailed comments on the
> > ODbL on the co-ment website.
>
> A large part of this comment focuses on the complexity of the ODbL.
> While simplicity is better, I think we should be allowed a reasonable
> amount of complexity in the writing of the license, if our goal is to
> make a license that can be reused by others, and if it makes the license
> more efficient and suited to our needs.
>
> My point is that licenses like CC or GPL are not that simple either, but
> their extended use makes them well-known and in this case a moderate
> amount of complexity is not a problem.
>
> JC
>
>
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons

[Simon Ward]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 12:39:01AM +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> What I wanted to say was that, to a certain degree, *any* certainty is 
> better than a random assortment of "may", "might", "the project 
> consensus seems to be that...", "i am not a lawyer but...", "depending 
> on your jurisdiction", and "depending on the judge's interpreation".

As I said, the terms do need to be more well defined, and defined the
same for everyone rather than relying solely on definitions in different
laws.  It’s an unfortunate fact that the licence will have a different
interpretation over the world whatever we do, but we can at least try to
solve the issues that we see rather than just giving up.

> I would very much like to avoid a situation in which an
> uncertainty in the interpretation of the license makes user A refrain
> from doing something (because he thinks it "might" be against the
> license) whereas user B brazenly does the same thing and gains some kind
> of advantage by doing it, and then A starts complaining to us.

Definitions of a Derived Database, Collective Database, Produced Work
and others are things we can make more clear to avoid uncertainty.

“Depending on jurisdiction” differences will be unavoidable.  The best
we can do is make it clear what is intended.  It does come back to my
comment about enforcing rights if they exist:  If there are fewer or no
copyright like rights in a jurisdiction, then everyone in that
jurisdiction is playing on the same pitch, and I feel they have more
freedom anyway.  If there are rights, we enforce them to keep the data
free in a jurisdicition that would allow another to keep data
proprietary.

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall


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