Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Richard said: I understand that Creative Commons declined to participate in drafting ODbL when invited. Why is that? Why the sudden interest in data now, after having declined the opportunity earlier? >>>>>>>>> I don't speak for CC here, I speak for SC, which was far less integrated into CC than you might have imagined. It's why we eliminated the division and moved west. But we had our own Board, our own lawyers, our own staff, and we lived three time zones away from CC. And we didn't do a great job of being integrated. As for SC, we were involved in the first go round of what became ODBL. We were able to convince all involved to write a public domain tool instead (PDDL) and then the SC protocol on data came out around the same time. CC also decided as a result, in part from what integration we did have between science and headquarters, to rebuild its public domain dedication as two tools - one a legal waiver (CC0) and one as a public domain "mark". Here's some background that I am at liberty to share. I wasn't the only one working in and around here, so I am only going to talk about the stuff I was involved in. First, there were differences in the European versions of the licenses that integrated database rights from other jurisdictions. After lengthy conversations in 2007 everyone agreed to turn those into waivers of the DB rights, so that if you use a jurisdiction specific EU 3.0 license, it should waive the DB rights. After that process, which was formally agreed to in 2007 at the Dubrovnik iSummit, we had to implement. That ate up a lot of what bandwidth we had for data rights. Second, in late 2007, a key SC employee who would have been essential to any work on any ODBL became gravely ill and was basically out of action for six months. When that employee was finally back, we were way behind on day to day work and didn't have a ton of bandwidth for projects that weren't funded, like our biological materials transfer and patent licensing projects. Third, after coming out with a strong statement against licensing data in the sciences, because our goal was interoperability, it would have been pretty hypocritical to then engage when people hired Jordan to start working on the revisions that became the ODBL (I believe that was actually OSM). I continue to think that the addition of a contract breaks interoperability - it certainly did so in the case of some core genomic databases - and that the creation and promotion of such a tool poses real risks in the sciences. I would rather work on getting OKF to discourage its use in the sciences, which is what Panton was all about for me. Panton basically says don't use licenses on publicly funded science data, including ODBL - or BY-SA. So it's not like we have a "sudden interest" in data. CC's had an interest from day 1, from MusicBrains to Freebase to Encyclopedia of Life. SC's had an interest from day 1. It's just that to this community in particular we managed to conflate those interests. It wasn't like we sat around and said hey, let's figure out ways not to work with the ODBL folks. We had very little time, lots of projects, not a lot of staff, and a lot of choices to make. We chose to put our time and effort at Science Commons elsewhere, and we weren't very well integrated with CC at that point either. When I was in a previous job, I heard an aphorism that stuck with me. Never assume malice when you can assume conference calls. That about sums it up. jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science Creative Commons web: http://creativecommons.org/science blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge twitter: @wilbanks ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Yup, I said this: "I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is already unprotected [under CC-BY-SA], and you cannot slap a license on it and protect it. ... That means I'm free to ignore any kind of share-alike you apply to your data. I've got a download of the OSM data dump. I can repost it, right now, as public domain." Said Matt Amos: very probably that wasn't the official creative commons line, and he wasn't a lawyer, but neither have i seen his comments officially refuted by anyone at CC. Nope, wasn't an "official line". It was a point about how easy it is to extract and republish data if you want do do so, because of the inexact reaches of copyright, database rights, and contract. The point was to be provocative, not to make a threat. I'm not ever going to republish a copy of the OSM data dump, because that would be an asshole maneuver (which, as an American, is I believe the King's English phrasing). But someone who didn't care about being an asshole could do so, and the remedies are a lot less clear than they are in software and culture. If the asshole isn't in the EU, and didn't get a copy under contract, what do you do? That was my point - to make people think about that. CC also isn't Science Commons. We got absorbed last year by CC, and CC's a lot more about providing choices, not about being normative. Our job at SC was to be normative, to push for more open uses of the tools inside the CC suite of tools. That's why we didn't *recommend* the use of the licenses on data in the sciences, and I was kind of naive in jumping over into your community and yelling about those terms here. I apologize for that. This isn't a science community. It's not publicly funded. And I'm not part of it. I shouldn't have gotten onto the list and ranted without spending time getting to know the community. Indeed, i've done a little mapping since then even. So I backed out, and let you guys hash it out, and I worked out my differences with OKF via the Panton Principles (http://pantonprinciples.org)- public science data should be in the public domain - while I let CC take over the conversation about data licensing generally. I remain an advocate for the public domain for data, and a skeptic as to the ability to magically port the tools of free culture and free software to free data. But I'm a lot less stressed about it than I used to be. Part of that is that the capacity to create data is so great - data that doesn't get licensed well won't get well used, whatever the tools chosen - and part of that is the result of talking to a lot more people who are in open data outside the sciences. Keep on posting old text that I cited, as I won't run from my own words. We all own what we say on lists. As I said, I shouldn't have gotten on here and posted so rashly, but it is what it is. But also keep watching the CC site and blog for information, because CC is the only one that speaks for CC. Science Commons ain't the voice of CC for data, and never was, and it's our collective fault in both parts of the organization that we allowed that to happen (as Mike Linksvayer pointed out in a post earlier this year at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26283). Back to lurking. jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science Creative Commons web: http://creativecommons.org/science blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge twitter: @wilbanks ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] OGC Geospatial Rights Management Summit
> On 9 Jun 2009, at 06:27, John Wilbanks wrote: > >> Puneet Kishor, who is a Science Commons Fellow looking at geospatial >> data and climate change, will be attending and hoisting the facts >> can't >> be copyrighted flag. > > Er, sounds like a red herring to me since they can have database > rights and be licensed who cares about the copyright for the purposes > of some ridiculous DRM schema that the big licensers will use? > > Best > > Steve As you've probably noticed around these parts, we argue against using those rights no matter who's using them, whether in the name of supposed "freedom" or in the name of enclosure. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] OGC Geospatial Rights Management Summit
Puneet Kishor, who is a Science Commons Fellow looking at geospatial data and climate change, will be attending and hoisting the facts can't be copyrighted flag. jtw legal-talk-requ...@openstreetmap.org wrote: Message: 7 Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:06:00 +0200 From: Frederik Ramm Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] OGC Geospatial Rights Management Summit To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." Message-ID: <4a2e17e8.4050...@remote.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hi, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > > "Facts are Facts and can't be Copyrighted" ... which ist not exactly the position that OSM is taking on this matter; in fact, with ODBL we go to great lengths to ensure that even if our facts should not be copyrightable we still get to say exactly under what conditions they are used through contract and database law. We're willing to enter completely uncharted waters and use a new and untested licensing framework precisely because we do *not* want our data to be free of any restrictions. So if you are looking for someone who takes the above position, best talk to one of the Science Commons guys! Bye Frederik ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons
>> Steve wrote: John I would assert that you're more worried about perceived competition for your licenses >> JTW says: If this were the case, we'd have taken in the ODbL, or we'd have written something like it. With CC's position in the licensing space it'd have been quickly adopted - people have been pressing me to get a database license out for five years. This would be so much easier than arguing for "no licenses" that I wish it were true. Gad, I'd love to have something to recommend rather than "give it all away and make it really free". >> Steve wrote: and that there are people out there who want to be able to keep attribution and share-alike. I appreciate that you're trying to stop people opening pandoras box and shoe horn the cornucopia of people who might want a database license in to the PDDL before they can figure out there are other options... but ultimately it's not going to work. Someone else, somewhere will try to do another ODbL even if you succeed stopping this one and ultimately people will use it. >> JTW says: This is deeply true and well taken. But as I've always tried to note, my job is to try and fight for the public domain in the sciences, and the existence of these licenses is a threat simply by the opening of the box (and Steve - thank you for this comment and appreciation. Seriously). Thus, I have to try to push the rock up the hill, however Sisyphean the task. Just because it's hard doesn't make it pointless. Unlike software, there is not a governing set of laws that require us to apply the ideas of property to create openness, and unlike software, the ideas of property may well hurt our task. Time will tell. I think OSM is a good community. I believe you've given me a good hearing, for which I thank you. And I accept that you've made the decision that you want SA. Based on a lengthy back and forth with Rufus and Jordan this morning, I'm going to take my high level issues with the license back to the okfn-list, and I'll keep lurking here but only to watch and answer questions. >> Steve wrote: The simplest use case I can think of are all the companies who have datasets that they're be happy with something like BY-SA but would never release anything under PDDL. It's not going to fly to just tell them all that they 'should' release things in to the public domain. >> This is true, and is fine for them. It just makes that data significantly less interoperable. I believe that many communities will come along and re-open that Pandora's Box, encode their own versions of share-alike, and we won't be able to put the data together. I hope I'm wrong, and the nice thing is that we'll have data in a few years to tell us the outcome. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons
> But open data is much more than just science and education. It's more > than OSM; it's more than maps. The assiduous > how-late-is-my-sodding-train-today people on our town website, for > example, are creating a database that could potentially be licensed > openly. Well put. Then let's open up the license working group to science and education and OSM and more. Then let's do a real analysis of the environmental impact of the license on other communities where the PD is already working and could be enclosed by an "open" database license. Then let's have more than a short window of comment time. But as far as I can tell, this is an OSM driven event. I don't know anyone outside OSM as a community rep that's on the working group. Yet it's being called an Open Database License for cross-community use. We spent about three years working on this across a range of scientific disciplines. CC has analyzed it in the context of education and culture. We came to the PD conclusion. OSM doesn't want to go PD - that's fine, in the end. But when you call the license written by and for a streetmapping community a solution for the rest of the world when the DBs and norms involved vary so much...well, it's odd to then get mad when the rest of the world comes in and comments on it. Your community cares more about reciprocity than interoperability. That's fine and dandy for you. But you're proposing to promote your solution, a complex one engineered and tuned for you, as something that is a generic solution *without doing the research* as to how it will work in generic situations. That's not fine and dandy. I am unaware of a single community other than OSM looking at this license. I've asked OKF and got the null response. Does anyone here know of another? I'd really like to know. Trust me, I have a lot of other things to do with my time. But as long as this license gets promoted as a generic solution for "open data" it gets debated inside science, and that has the direct consequence of enclosing the public domain in my space. My job is to prevent that. If the name could simply be changed I would have a lot less problems here... jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science, Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org http://sciencecommons.org http://neurocommons.org "We make sharing easy, legal, and scalable." ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL comments from Creative Commons
> From: Richard Fairhurst > Though I have a lot of time for CC in general, and agree with their general > stance that PD is the ideal way to go, I don't really find that a very > useful response. > > I count 20 occurrences of the word "science", "scientists" or similar; eight > of "education" and "educator"; but not a single one of "map" or "geo". If this were the "Open Street Map License" and not the "Open Database License" it's unlikely we would have such a strong opinion. It's one thing for a community of practice to embed its norms in its own license. It's quite another to create such a license and promote its use for all databases. Though I disagree fundamentally with share-alike on data for a lot of reasons, I disagree even more with the promotion of the idea of licensing into data generally. This isn't simply about OSM writing its own license - it's about the promotion of the idea that complex licensing in the name of "freedom" is a good idea, and that's going to have effects that reach far beyond your community, indeed, into places where the public domain has to date been the vital steward of data sharing. Software and culture work pretty well for the promotion of single licenses. But a database of mapping and geo is very different from a database of biology, chemistry, or physics. And it's even more different than a database of cultural works. The promotion of a geomapping set of norms as an "open database license" is part of the reason I have such an allergic reaction to this license. I'd far prefer this be the OSM license, but so far, it's being promoted as a generic solution and as such it's going to be considered by scientists, educators, loop creators, and on and on and on. So comments *must* address concerns that go beyond those of the immediate community. jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science, Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org http://sciencecommons.org http://neurocommons.org "We make sharing easy, legal, and scalable." ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] legal-talk Digest, Vol 31, Issue 4
> > (although I find the idea that freedom can only come from the > > barrel of a license deeply depressing). > That's CC Zero out of the running then. Actually no. This is a slightly wonky lawyer debate about semantics, but we think tools like CC0 should be called *waivers* and not *licenses*. Licenses reserve some rights and impose some conditions - they are "some rights reserved" - and there's a contract established between two parties. Waivers do not reserve rights or impose conditions. They create zones of public domain, and there are no contracts between the parties. This is why if you peruse the CC0 site, you'll see it referred to as a legal tool and not a license. It's a small thing, but an important thing to remember. Conflating the waiving of rights with the licensing of rights is what we're trying to avoid in this context. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] compatibility with CC licenses
I am not speaking for CC the organization here - there have been no conversations to my knowledge about doing a compatibility check between ODbL and CC licensing. But, I would remind everyone that the current official CC policy on CC licenses and databases - indeed, on any legal tools other than PD for databases - is the science commons protocol on open access to data, which calls for the PD position only. This position comes from a goal of promoting interoperability across domains of data. We started out endorsing the use of CC licenses on the "copyrightable elements of databases" but not the data itself. After about three years of research we decided that was a really Bad Thing if what we wanted was data integration. The experience with GFDL and CC is instructive - even when freedoms are similar, license compatibility is hard. We are trying to promote a web of integrated data, where one can take gobs of clinical trial data and gobs of geospatial data and mash them together, and if each group has share alike licensing with "slightly different" wording, then interoperability fails. Not to mention what happens when you have to deal with things like patient privacy from open medical data mixing into the share alike requirements from non-medical data. We found that each community has its own norms and desires, and that embedding those norms into licenses was very likely to result in non-compatible legal code. Please see http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/ for the formal position on these things. jtw ps - Jordan's PDDL was the first legal tool to comply with the protocol, and we're looking hard at creating some formal norms language and tools. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Starting Repository For Public Domain, OSM Data
CC Zero attempts to fix this. I'm not sure where the process sits right now - but the core issue is that the public domain is not a simple thing to reconstruct. That's why at SC we actually didn't create a single legal tool to create the PD, but instead a protocol. This is more in the spirit of technical standards documents than "use this contract" - it allows a flourishing of ways to implement. Jordan Hatcher is the author of the Public Domain Dedication License by the way, not CC. However, the PDDL is the only license that SC currently certifies as compliant with the protocol - CC Zero isn't there yet. See: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/ And: http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/ jtw Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Starting Repository For Public Domain OSM Data To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 8:19 PM, Sunburned Surveyor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I suppose there is the Public Domain Dedication from the Creative > > Commons that we could use as well, although that will have to be > > discussed among the participants. Or the Open Data Commons Public > > Domain Dedication and License, > > > > http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ > > http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/ The CC PD dedication has the usual problems in jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights. CC Zero is designed to fix this, I believe. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status
Frederik, I'm still lurking on this list - rather than demagogue the issue, I'm mainly watching the comments and trying to learn from them. It's actually very interesting to watch a community struggle with the issues in real time. In the absence of evidence - this is all very new - there's a ton of ideology-based assumptions that we all are making in this debate, both in the pro-share alike faction and here at Science Commons in favor of the PD. As I've noted here and elsewhere, my ideology is that *data integration is essential* and that leads me to my conclusions. Thus, I think that the Share Alike choice on data is a closed choice in disguise, and that PD is the natural state of data on the network. Time will provide us with the evidence we need to make data-driven decisions. In the interim there has been a fair amount of movement in other areas of geospatial that have reached out to SC to do PD work, so I'm focusing most of my energy in this space on that area. Spending my time preaching doesn't seem the best investment when I can instead work to help communities that already want to build PD-based systems... jtw ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Message: 5 Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:35:30 +0200 From: Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] License Change Status? To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; delsp=yes; format=flowed Hi, > > being new to the legals-list, I tried to search on the wiki I found > > this > > link: > > http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 Which is half a year old. In the mean time we have witnessed one guy from Science Commons defending their recommendation of "CC0", and SteveC going characteristically ballistic in response, and a little bit of discussion about whether and how the "contractual" aspect of the new license might work - but not a lot more than that. > > Would a more clear explanation on the alternatives and maybe an > > informal > > "poll" (through a webtool) among contributors help find feelings of > > the > > contributors and allow the Foundation to take a "wise" decision > > that is > > best community-backed (or see if further details need explanation > > to the > > community)? I am not sure. Regarding the "PD vs Share-Alike" discussion, both sides have been known to wildly exaggerate risks to a point where it could be called demagogy. If you create a poll from the statements issued in these discussions, the poll would look like this: Would you prefer OSM to a. become endlessly bogged down in legal hassles and die a slow death or b. be sucked empty by evil Google & Co. and die a slow death? Adding the question of license change to this "poll" might look like: or would you prefer to c. delete half our data and re-license the rest under a license that's not used by anybody else on the web? ... all of which is not exactly what we want people to think ;-) and this is probably the core of why we're not seeing the discussion we ought to have. Too much danger of hurting people; a typical situation encountered in politics where the politician knows that global warming is a problem but at the same time anything he can do is unpopular and will provoke lots of angry people shouting him down. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49?00'09" E008?23'33" ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] legal-talk Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1
First to the stallman quote - I'm not surprised at all that RMS likes copyleft on maps. FWIW, I do too. When you frame the question as "should be licensed under copyleft" I would tend to answer "yes". I was instead encouraging you to engage in a conversation with him about the freedom and morality of database and data licensing, about the potential implications both for good and for bad of the various choices at the table here. I haven't done so on this topic with him, so I've not salted this earth to ambush you. on to 80n's question: > I appreciate the effort you have gone to. It would be helpful if you could > elaborate on the reasons why each of these lawyers came to the conclusions > they did. Thanks for the kind comment - it's appreciated. I have pretty much laid out the answers as they came to me in my previous emails, in most cases directly quoting the answers. This wasn't treated as a complex issue to me - "Feist solved that" was the common theme followed closely by "in databases, the only things that matter are arrangement and sweat of the brow" and thus this type of thing was irrelevant. There was a general sense that this was a sidebar matter, not a central one - answers were in short staccato sentences, not paragraphs. > My suspicion is that you asked about GPS traces, whereas we are concerned > with geo-data that is derived, manually, from an aggregate of GPS traces, > aerial photography, human observation and a tad of cartography. Theses are > two very different animals. Can you confirm which of these your answer > pertains to? I asked something in between. I was assuming GPS traces, human observation, and aerial, because that's what I found when I dug around on geospatial data generally. But I was not talking about the nodes and ways and such in OSM, simply the actual factual data. And the answer was that it doesn't matter how data gets collected, as long as it's data. A poster noted earlier that the nodes and ways are pretty likely to be found under copyright and the maps are definitely copyrighted, and that's what the research turns up also. Cartography might change things. I can't speak to that, because I didn't ask it (the same risk of copyrights propagating from maps to data there though, I would assume). > The fake entries in Rural's directory were random phone numbers. There was > no claim that they were creative works. If there had been then it would > have set a precedent, but the ruling rested solely on a consideration of > copyright in the directory as a collection of facts. > > Indeed, if you read the case summary then you'll see that it does > acknowledge that a directory containing fact *can* be copyrighted if the > selection and arrangement is novel or creative (although the facts > themselves cannot). But in this case, a listing of telephone numbers, it > failed on both these counts/ there was no selection, one of the conditions > of Rural's monopoly was that they were required to include *every* phone > number/ and the arrangment was not novel either - alphabetical order was > considered to be obvious and unoriginal. I've read the case summary, it's stimulating stuff :-) No one made the case that these were creative works, thus they were not considered as such. I'm not arguing that my research turned that up. What I heard from the lawyers, again, was that the fact that these were part of the case, but not even deemed worthy of arguing up or down, creates a precedent mitigating against consideration of easter eggs as relevant to the copyrightability of the knowledge compilation. Another direct quote is that "there is no 'gotcha' that can clearly transform the copyrightability of a database - feist provides a test based on arrangement and originality, and that's what i would argue in court, no matter how catchy the easter eggs were." jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] clarifying
I'm about to head onto a plane for the next day or so, but I wanted to address something I sensed in the last email exchange. Hopefully if you're interested in what I'm typing here, you've actually read the protocol on OA to data - it's at http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/ and it's by far the clearest explication of my position here. Please read it if you've not done so, at least, if you want to go back and forth with me, as it lays out the end of a long research project. A few points to call out from it, for this argument. All of these are in the first person because they represent my own *opinions* and not statements of fact. - I am not trying to say that databases don't have copyright - I'm saying that about data, not databases. I have been trying to articulate where the general consensus about copyright stands (thus, when there is a copyright on databases, it comes from arrangement, not easter eggs). But it's very clear to everyone that there is copyright somewhere in DBs. That's in the protocol. - I am trying to say that the danger of using the ODL approach versus the PDDL approach (which is the one I prefer - Jordan's done both of the big ones!) is in the *propagation* of asserted rights from the database down to the data, because it's so hard to figure out where copyright stops and starts. Viz our debate here. This is also laid out in more detail in the protocol - the risk that users will assume the copyright extends to the traces in this case from the maps. - I believe the risk of this propagation of asserted rights poses long-term problems for the utility of data. To make a simple example, I am in discussions with some holders of clinical trial data about mixing it up with geospatial data, so that responses to trials and cancer prevalence patterns can be mapped by neighborhood. Clinical trial data is subject to privacy requirements which are totally incompatible with the types of contractual assertions made in the ODL. Thus, OSM is not a candidate for use in this mashup project. - I believe that this type of data mashup approach is going to increase in variety, complexity, and importance over the coming yeas. I also believe that the public domain approach, in which the owner *knows it has some rights in the database but waives them*, is the approach that makes a given database more likely to be a foundational source than others. That is the freedom that I am arguing for - the freedom to integrate this data into other kinds of data entirely, which may well be totally incompatible with share-alike for lots of reasons, or which we don't even know about yet. The share-alike contingent of this list argues for a different kind of freedom, in which the provision of your data to them requires the recontribution of data. Two different freedoms, competing with each other...it is that distinction in desired freedoms that forms that basis of our disagreement, and it's a legitimate distinction for us both to make. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] legal-talk Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1
I got a question from the list, did some research, and herein present the answers. That's it - as Steve noted early in this, IANAL, and arguments about the law between non lawyers can be as absurd as arguments about geospatial nodes between lawyers... I suggest you sit down with some lawyers and pose these questions yourself - it's what I did, and I got the answer that you don't like. Apologies for that, but it's what (including one geospatial scientist who is also an attorney) the research turned up. > Ignore all the facts and focus please on just the non-factual, creative > easter eggs. Suppose someone creates a series of fake streets with fake > names (suppose that they all rhyme, just to make sure that they pass muster > as creative elements - although the criteria is generally considered to be > very low). If this collection of rhyming fake names is published then it > will be copyrightable. They will not necessarily be copyrightable. I again strongly suggest you talk to a lawyer about this and see what you find, rather than engaging me in argument. I posed this as a pretty generic query and got a strong set of answers back, and I talked to people with whom I quarrel about the law and freedom - just those with whom I agree - and the answer was unanimous. > Agreed, Feist v Rural is irrelevant here. The fake entries were just used > for copy detection, they played no part in the case. Actually, I'm told it is indeed relevant here. The case considered whether or not the entire compilation was copyrightable, including the fake entries, which could very well have been rhyming or whatever you want them to be in terms of creativity. The entire compilation was found to be non copyrightable. That places the most important precedent of modern copyright law squarely on the side of easter eggs being irrelevant to copyright - and whatever you or I think of the wisdom of that, that's the precedent. Again, this is what my research turned up. Jordan, can you jump in here and give an educational viewpoint? jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] legal-talk Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1
> This case doesn't seem remotely relevant to the question of Easter-eggs. It > rests on originality of the arrangement of facts. In what way does it have > anything to do with this question? > > 80n > The Feist case rested on the fact that false entries were placed in a phone book as a discovery method, and that the phone book might be copyrightable. It was not found to be copyrightable. Listings of peoples' addresses are listings of facts, just as listings of GPS traces are listings of facts. Adding fake ones doesn't make that a creative work. The case - and other similar cases - don't even pivot on the addition of fake listings to make the database a creative work, but rather on the arrangement of facts and the effort required to make a database (as you note). In the US these things don't make a difference but in the EU and the UK and Australia, they *may* make a difference, but it varies by the country of jurisdiction. But the case directly considered the addition of easter eggs and found that a data listing with easter eggs was uncopyrightable. In other words, adding fake facts to a listing of facts doesn't matter in terms of copyright. What matters is arrangement and effort, and those two only matter in come jurisdictions. Thus, the Easter Egg issue is considered irrelevant to the decision, and thus is deeply unlikely to be considered an issue in deciding whether or not a database is subject to copyright. From the lawyer's perspective (not mine, but unanimous of those I interviewed about this) there is no difference between a database of facts in phone books, genes, or GPS traces. The content of the facts is irrelevant - what matters is that the facts could be re-measured again and again by anyone to get the same results. That means all phone listings will be the same, all our gps traces, all our genomes, etc. That means no creative expression. Including some fake stuff to catch copiers hasn't been held to transform those collections into creative works - the transformation, if it is held to happen, is instead found in the arrangement. jtw ps - Those of you interested in copyleft and freedom might want to interview Stallman on this issue as well. He lives down the hall from our offices and has interesting opinions on the topic of how often one should use licenses to achieve one's goals, and what impacts one should enable. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] Easter eggs in the database
In response to some questions on whether or not the addition of easter eggs (false data) to the OSM database might make it a "Creative Work" and thus subject to copyright law...I asked around (5 lawyers, 4 of them practicing, one law professor). The answer held close to my expectations, which is that no answer would be found that gave this debate a magic conclusion. In the US, the answer is pretty clearly no - this is from the classic Feist v. Rural Telephone case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service). In the UK and the EU, the answer is murkier. The UK and the EU give more credit to the sweat of the brow argument to protect a database, but that doesn't come from the fake entries - it comes from the work required to put together the good stuff, not the fake stuff. In short, I don't think it changes the contours of the argument either way. It's a way of figuring out if someone is copying, but it's not part of the legal decisionmaking. GSDI was an interesting event. In preparing my comments it was gratifying to see how much true public domain global spatial data there is. In some conversations where I referenced the OSM debates there was the idea that the OSM locational traces could be in the public domain while letting some of the higher level work sit under another license. That would put some minimal, and clearly factual, data into the PD under the banner of the project. Anyhow, as usual, YMMV. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] GSDI 10
If anyone will be at GSDI in Trinidad this week, drop me a note if you'd like to meet in person. I'm speaking at the plenary session on Wednesday. I will likely refer to this debate in my comments but only in a general sense (i.e. I won't name anyone, just outline the contours of the PDDL/ODL debate). jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] transitive contracts
--- Gerv says > Why can't contracts make contracts transitive? "You agree that if you >pass this data on to someone else, they need to sign the same > undertaking." --- Contracts can, indeed, do this. But if one person breaks the chain and posts, then the chain is broken, and the share-alike stops. That's the thing. Share-alike is entirely based on copyright. It doesn't have the magic power in the absence of copyright - that's why it started out being called copyleft and not dataleft. If you're going to pursue people in the court of public opinion, I don't understand why you won't use a public domain + trademark strategy. Using contracts you don't plan to enforce strikes me as a very odd strategy. But that's in the end why it isn't my choice. And this is definitely not science, where there's a real power to the public domain. Re: the HapMap, there's dozens of references as to how the clickwrap prevented the database's integration into the broader life sciences community database and I'm happy to dig some up, but I'm a little slammed right now. You can google your way there in the interim, it's not buried treasure. There's also the NASA image archives and pretty much all US government data including survey data - all PD. There's a lot of other good stuff to respond to, but I don't want to be a listbully and try to fisk every answer. I think the post about 3% caring about PD and 3% caring about share alike and 94% watching the fuss is probably accurate. It tends to be so. But as in cultural works, so in data. The policy that Disney pursues locks up scholarly papers, and the policy that you pursue may well interact in ten years with something you can't imagine. My worry is that in the future there will be a project that is based on the public domain that could compete meaningfully with a closed project, and they will pass over your data because you have enclosed it in a contract that failed to prevent the exposure of your data. It's not just about the uses you envision today. It's about 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line. Strategies built on strong copyrights and IPRs have a long lifetime, and a lot of unintended consequences. If you do pursue the strategy of a clickwrap, I do hope that you implement and clickwrap and a registration policy, so that you can track your users. You will not be able to name and shame people who don't sign contracts - there will always be the excuse that they got the data somewhere else unless you have proof, and contracts have much more weight when the user know you've tracked them. I hope you choose not to pursue that strategy. But if you do, do it well. I'm not going to be able to respond in real time for a while - I'm traveling and in conferences where I don't expect to have wifi - and I'm on digest form, so if there's a question you really want answered please copy me individually in your emails to the list, as those will come straight through to my inbox. jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] transitive copyright and "creative errors"
answering two at once: jtw --- Rob says: I view OSM as a three-layer stack WRT copyright: 1. At the bottom are the GPS traces or other data. This is basically factual data, and so not copyrightable. I don't think issues of personal data or expressiveness come into this. 2. Above this are the nodes, segments and ways, based on that data. This involves some human decision making, and is a structured data set. For me, not being a lawyer, this is a grey area and could go either way. 3. Above this are the maps, rendered from this data, which are copyrightable. The duration of that copyright is debatable depending on whether the maps are regarded as computer generated or not. The nice thing about the ODL is that this stack can be modeled in licences. But I don't want to see a situation where the "bad guys" can remove users rights and OSM's licence just helps the good guys stay good. If the contract approach has that effect, in particular if the copyleft it creates isn't transitive then I am concerned about it. --- I think this is a pretty good summary, actually. The issue is mostly about the data in #1 and the stuff in #2. I think #2 could indeed go either way - that's probably uncompiled code from a legal perspective and I'm not even sure how I would want the courts to decide on it. My gut is against the relentless expansion of IPRs, so that leads me to lean in the hope that #2 is still PD data, but I understand the desire to give people incentives to do the work as well. But indeed, contracts in the absence of IPRs are non-transitive. That's the point of a contract - it's only binding to the people that sign it. Otherwise I could sign a contract with Rob and it would bind Steve - and something tells me Steve doesn't want me in particular to sign him up for anything. We're back to the problem of privity. When you try to mix a contract-based approach with an open download policy, you get into a tough space. Either you have to start a culture of tracking and enforcement or you have to expect that if someone - maybe not an evil company, maybe just a griefer - reposts your data two computers removed from the computer that downloaded it - and that your data will then essentially be in the public domain. -- 80n says: John, perhaps you could comment on the following often suggested gambit: Interspersed within all the facts in the OSM data dump are a number of non-factual elements. There are both accidental errors and probably quite a few *deliberate* errors (I know of some). These non-facts are presumably creative works and can be covered by copyright law just like any other creative work. Your suggestion that you can do what you like with the data somehow seems to ignore this minor detail. How would you propose to filter out the non-fact elements that are genuinely copyright? --- That's a completely new one to me. I need to do some research on it before I comment in any detail. But it will pivot on whether or not the factual errors are indeed creative works. If they were then in theory they could create a risk scenario in which a user would have to assume that all the data was potentially contaminated by copyright. But wouldn't that also create a distrust in the data compared to data sets that didn't have deliberately introduced errors? Questions, questions. In the life sciences, the better the data set, the closer it is to describing the world as it is. And the danger is of unknown errors. But every community is different. Let me do some thinking and research on this one and I will try to come back with an intelligible answer soon. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] Houses of cards
> > Quoting SteveC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > >> >> And you believe NavTeq and TeleAtlas are also built on a house of >> >> cards? >> >> >> >> Are the Nokia and TomTom due diligence people really that stupid? > > > > No, but they are big corporations with expensive lawyers who are good > > at drafting impressive-looking EULAs that would be costly to challenge > > in court. Well I can tell you exactly what they do, their licenses are based on the same three things that the ODL is. The Database Directive, copyright and contract. So I can't dig through and find the NavTeq and TeleAtlas contracts, but if anyone wants to send them my way, I'll look at them. But my instinct is that the contracts are built on a fourth pillar, which is trade secret. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret At least in the US, trade secret allows much more protection over a compilation of information than any other system. It's obviously not available to OSM as a strategy. I'm also willing to bet there's a boatload of nasty DRM on it. They aren't based on a house of cards, so to speak, they're based on a culture of enforcement. It's where you wind up if you choose a culture of compulsion of behavior based on data - there's no floating IPRs to scare people away. Either you simply have a license that you don't try to enforce, or you chase down the bad guys. Another way of saying it is thusly: if you have enough money, you can keep a house of cards standing for a long time, especially if you keep that house off the public web and you know each person who has a copy, so it's easy to know who to sue if it shows up somewhere. Mixing the NavTeq strategy with an open, unrestricted download link is tricky business. If you do take that road you should probably install a clickwrap page and at a minimum force people to sign the contract btw - it's even less enforceable if there isn't even a clickthrough. The thing that is at debate here is the inherent tension between being an open community and attempting to compel behavior. There is no such tension at NavTeq. There's a closed community, and if you want to get the database, you have to identify yourself, sign a big scary contract, and be tracked by a big scary company that has plenty of money to sue you. Or you take the PD strategy and tell NavTeq that the value of their trade secret is rapidly dropping as OSM emerges as an alternative in the PD. You let NavTeq's open competitor use your trademarks, and your community's goodwill, with a trademark strategy. You mock the culture of control and enforcement. I'm pretty passionate about this in the life sciences, after watching a community in the life sciences go down the road of "let's use an open contract to compel open behavior" - it is called the HapMap database of human genetic variation. It was created as a precompetitive database of information, but with a clickwrap that asked users of the data not to encumber future users - i.e., don't file patents that foreclose on the database. The clickwrap was quietly removed after 18 months because it didn't work, despite the HapMap folks indeed having more money than God - $100M US I recall. Not only was it impossible to achieve those goals in contract, it was preventing the integration of the database into other databases. And the public domain was the only solution that they found. See http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Info/Press/2004/041213.shtml It's a pattern, this public domain thing. I could have recommended to CC that we embrace the ODFL, or write our own - people would have LOVED it. It'd have taken off like sliced bread - if we wanted to own this space, that would have been the successful, though hollow and cynical, strategy. It's far harder to argue for the public domain than to market a CC license as the answer to all of life's problems for data. The PD is a hard sell, as this debate proves... ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Ordnance data
Here's the link referenced: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/prot-databases/prot-databases_en.htm While there's been a lot of challenges as to the efficacy of the sui generis right, not surprisingly, the industry wants to keep anything it can in terms of rights. That's the hard thing - once you start using IPR, it can be an addictive habit.. > How could you extract it, if there is a contract in your way? OK, let's say I'm evil. I hire someone to sign and violate the contract, then repost. I download the copy that person put online. The contract no longer attaches. jtw Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote: > El Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008, John Wilbanks escribió: >> OK, now we are at the heart of it. > > It seems I'll have to fetch my flamethrower ;-) > >> If the database law attaches, you're using a bad law - one that may well >> be repealed, and has been rebuked even by the EC itself. > > Pardon me? When has such a thing taken place? > >> And it's uncompiled code - we don't know what "substantial" extraction >> means, > > The ODL makes a statement here by using the word "systematic". So, if you had > to build a small program to extract the data given a polygon, bounding box, > or a certain tag, it's substantial at the eyes of OSM. > >> If the copyright law attaches and the data is PD, I can extract it and >> your contract doesn't matter. > > How could you extract it, if there is a contract in your way? > > (I mean, extract without breaking the contract) > > (Disclaimer: IANAL, this e-mail is biased) ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Ordnance data
OK, now we are at the heart of it. If the database law attaches, you're using a bad law - one that may well be repealed, and has been rebuked even by the EC itself. And it's uncompiled code - we don't know what "substantial" extraction means, or what I could do if I downloaded and extracted in a non-governed domain. If the copyright law attaches and the data is PD, I can extract it and your contract doesn't matter. You pays your money and you takes your choice. jtw Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote: > El Miércoles, 20 de Febrero de 2008, John Wilbanks escribió: >> *Maps* may indeed be copyrighted. > > Agreed. > >> The data that underlies those maps is probably in the public domain... > > Agreed, and that's what the Open Data Factual Info License addresses. > > *But* when you put together a large enough quantity of PD data, you get > either > DB protection or copyright protection (depending on your jurisdiction). > That's what the ODL addresses, and that's how we can keep the share-alike > component. > > (Disclaimer: IANAL, this e-mail may be biased) > ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] Ordnance data
-- John - this is ridiculous. Of course we can slap a new license on our map data to better protect it. Why do people persist with this notion that maps cannot be copyrighted? The Ordnance Survey has won a number of court cases. Aled. -- Ordnance Survey data carries a "crown copyright" unlike your data. See http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/copyright/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom And also note that the existence and assertion of crown copyright is held to have limited the use and benefits of ordnance survey data compared to the (public domain) survey data created by the us government. Again, this is a place where reasonable people may disagree. *Maps* may indeed be copyrighted. The data that underlies those maps is probably in the public domain... jtw ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] answers to bvh
I'm going to answer two at once here. And I'm not questioning anyone's motivations - I think this debate is at the heart of a good group of people, trying to find a solution that fits their goals, in an uncertain space and without a lot of clear guidance. I hope everyone involved can take a deep breath and realize that the battles inside a group of people with similar beliefs can be the hardest sometimes. The law at this stage is like uncompiled code when it comes to data - when it goes to court, that is when you find out whether it runs or not. I just happen to be convinced that the code is likely to compile in a certain way. jtw - from bvh: Common, this is insulting : OSM as a project has never gone after violators, let alone engaged in the obsessive behaviour that you describe. To paint us as would be RIAA-ist who want to engage in serial litigation goes so counter your measured approach in the first part of your email that I wonder if it is written by the same person. -- from me (JTW): Apologies, I am not implying this is an OSM position. I've found this community remarkably civil. Even the private emails I've gotten from my post are civil :-) But in the whole concept of a share-alike license, the idea is to compel behavior. If you're not going to think about enforcement, why compel? That is part and parcel of the strategy and it needs to be explicit...what will you do if you adopt the share-alike approach and someone violates? I also think it's very proper to think about rewarding the people who play nice. If you've ever been on pirate bay, you know that the bad guys tend to do whatever they want, and the good guys don't always win. I'd rather set up systems that recognize the legal reality and reward the good guys for being good. Any system based on restrictions or enforcement will someday have to deal with enforcement... you also make some very interesting arguments about the copyrightability of your database, which I think would be the kind of thing that gets figured out in court. It's just that my experience hasn't trained me to expect the courts to get things right, and that there is a lot of background as to why I could extract the underlying data from the OSM project without touching the arrangement - and that makes my position as a pirate reposter pretty strong. -- from bvh: Strange then that the position of Creative Commons is that there is no effective copyright... If it is such a clear cut case as Creative Commons maintains, then where do the insecurities come from? -- from me (JTW) This is a great question. In my experience, this comes from general counsels freaked out about risk - an institution tends to prefer avoiding all risk when possible, and the risk that the CC position is found wrong is enough to stop participation. this is embodied in the data protocol, where we talk about the difficulty in figuring out where copyright starts and stops. when it comes to science, my position is that it's better to default to the side of the public domain, to create zones of certainty. again, YMMV. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Deconstructing the "loss of data" claim
It's hard to bully when you have no leverage. I don't have a vote here. But the truth about the public domain is the truth, no matter how hard anyone wants to believe otherwise. I'm not a lawyer, indeed. I have however spent ten years in this space working as a pivot point between coders, scientists, funders, business people, and lawyers though. I have a little background. And I spent most of the last three years of my life investigating exactly how data licensing works in science and more generally on the web. Thanks to the CC world, I had access to some pretty smart people. I came to the conclusion that the PD is the only solution. Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig - it's still a pig. And data is still the public domain, regardless of the contract you attach to it. You should feel free to disregard that conclusion if you disagree, though others including those lawyers involved in CC, at both the staff and board level, have agreed. As they say on the internets, YMMV. And again, I'm here to take flames like this, not browbeat. I simply want to make sure that if this community goes forward with a contractual restriction that attempts to impose share-alike or non-commercial, it does so in full knowledge of how hard that will be to maintain in a court of law. I frankly don't think I was being emotional - it doesn't matter much to me as an individual in the end if this community chooses share-alike. My battles daily are in the life sciences, in the world of genes and proteins, not in GSM data. And I care a lot emotionally about the impact of bad licensing on the likelihood of finding a disease. There, I am proud of my emotions. Here I'm just trying to engage in a community because Jordan asked me to do so, and because I see a community trying to make a decision. "CC has more money than God" - well, SC doesn't. We will hopefully, someday soon - I'd like to make market wage, myself. But that's a different story, and doesn't really seem relevant. I'm speaking for myself here, but I don't make decisions at work based on the goal of making money - I make them based on the goal of promoting the commons. But the commons is built on the public domain first, not the license - the license is only necessary to the extent that the public domain is encroached upon by bad law and bad practice. I'd like to see communities build themselves on strong legal bases. I'd like to see the public domain be the first recourse for data providers. I think that's a world I want to live in. But I don't have a vote, and I don't deserve one - I'm a noob here, and this is your community. As I said, I'll stay here and respond as long as you folks want. Thanks for listening. jtw SteveC wrote: > John > > If we're being frank, it appears CC have been bullying everyone with > this PD stuff. > > I'll let Jordan respond to your points (and I hope he has time), but > it's clear that you fundamentally disagree on whether the ODL actually > works or not, and you do it in a rather strange and emotional way given > that your bio[1] seems to show no legal qualifications (please forgive > me if I've misread something). > > 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. > > For now, as Jordan is an actual lawyer, I'm going to continue voting ODL. > > Best > > Steve > > [1] - http://creativecommons.org/about/people#34 > > > On 19 Feb 2008, at 23:54, John Wilbanks wrote: > >> Hi everyone. My name is John Wilbanks. I am the VP for Science Commons >> at Creative Commons, and I'm the one who wrote the Protocol for >> Implementing Open Access to Data. >> >> I've been lurking here for a couple of weeks. I don't like showing up >> and posting without getting a sense of the community. But I think it's >> important to join this debate and get your responses...I'll stay here on >> this list, I'll take questions, and I'll take flames. I'm glad you're >> having this debate. It's a good debate. And I'm stoking the fires of it >> with this post - but I think you deserve my honest sense on this, and >> not a mumbling political post. >> >> I am speaking here as an individual who endured 18 months of research >> into open data as part of CC, but not on behalf of CC the organization. >> >>>> The issue was quite simple. We need to have a license that better >>>> protects the OSM data >> >> I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is >> already unprotected, and you cannot slap a license on i
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Deconstructing the "loss of data" claim
Hi everyone. My name is John Wilbanks. I am the VP for Science Commons at Creative Commons, and I'm the one who wrote the Protocol for Implementing Open Access to Data. I've been lurking here for a couple of weeks. I don't like showing up and posting without getting a sense of the community. But I think it's important to join this debate and get your responses...I'll stay here on this list, I'll take questions, and I'll take flames. I'm glad you're having this debate. It's a good debate. And I'm stoking the fires of it with this post - but I think you deserve my honest sense on this, and not a mumbling political post. I am speaking here as an individual who endured 18 months of research into open data as part of CC, but not on behalf of CC the organization. > > The issue was quite simple. We need to have a license that better > > protects the OSM data I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is already unprotected, and you cannot slap a license on it and protect it. This sounds to me like someone deciding to put a license on the United States Constitution. You're welcome to try that - but that license will not change the underlying legal status of the Constitution, which is the public domain. That means I'm free to ignore any kind of share-alike you apply to your data. I've got a download of the OSM data dump. I can repost it, right now, as public domain. You can perhaps try to sue me - though I'm pretty sure I would win. But you absolutely couldn't sue anyone who came along and downloaded my copy and then reposted that same data as public domain. There's no copyright on your data, and that means that only the people who sign your deal are bound to it, not anyone who gets it from the people who sign your deal. Unlike the copyright on a song, which travels along with the song no matter what, the share-alike is restricted to the parties of the contract. It's called privity - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privity_of_contract That's why the ODC was something that CC didn't support. It holds out a promise of power that is illusory. Privity + no IPRs = easy to repost as public domain. > Do we? What's the threat? How has it been assessed? The threat comes from people who are worried about data "Capture" - but it is wrong to think that the law is a magic wand here. GPL style approaches only work in the presence of copyrights. They simply don't have the power in data. The real answer is: if you put your data online, it's essentially in the public domain. Bad people know this and will exploit it. That's what you don't want to allow. But simply posting the data gives the bad people a lot of power. The nice people are going to obey your rules and be constricted by them, but not the bad people. I would encourage you to think not about the threat, about those who will take the data and not recontribute, or who will sell the data, than about the good people. Given that the data is already in the public domain, whatever license you choose, how will you instead *reward* those who think it's worth being a good citizen? That can be done with moral statements of normative behaviors and a trademark for OSM - only those who behave get to use it and advertise themselves as OSM compliant. It's a far healthier strategy in many ways than relentlessly trying to stamp out perceived violators. One can imagine a data owner beginning to empathize with the RIAA, who see violations everywhere and in so doing, loses focus of the opportunities for good outcomes. > > OSM never started out as a PD project so why would we think that it > > would be better to recommend it go PD now? Because that's the legal status of the project. My copy of your data is in the public domain. It doesn't matter what the wiki license says - that license only protects copyrighted things. You can choose to use contracts to entangle users, like the ODC does, but it will only block the good guys. The bad guys can work around that in less time than it takes to download your data. jtw ps - Jordan Hatcher, who drafted both the ODC and the PDDL, is a remarkable attorney and far more knowledgeable on the details of the contracts than I am. I'm proud to call him a colleague. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
