Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Progressing OSM to a new dataLicence regime
Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote: It's been proposed by me several times in the past. I think it's essential. I don't know of a similar major project that doesn't do some kind of assignment. Wikipedia is the nearest, but Wikipedia is a collection of articles that all stand on their own. Can you name some which do? We need a situation where someone can say Yes when an enquiry comes in, not hire a lawyer to look at license XYZ. Otherwise the data is useless for many purposes that everyone would agree it should be allowed for. But surely a license is a codification of what everyone agrees it should be allowed for? For example, a while ago, ITN news needed a map of Baghdad. No one could say for sure how much of the TV buletin they would have to release CC-by-sa in order to allow them to do that. Looking back at that now, probably only the final ITN styled bitmap image that is shown on the screen, but the designers of ITN's style guidelines probably haven't licensed ITN to release them. If the foundation owned the data, they could say to ITN just show a logo and www.openstreetmap.org in the corner at some point, and everyone would be happy. As I understand it, the new licence solves this problem. Another example: it would be great if an npemap type system could be used with OSM maps to derive a free postcode database, but license incompatibilities make that impossible. This is insane. (Define free.) You may think so. Other contributors may think it's entirely reasonable for postcode data calculated using OSM to be BY-SA rather than PD. Obviously if that went to any kind of vote, the foundation would allow that, but they don't currently have the power to allow it. It would certainly be interesting to look at whether the licence change would have any effect on the postcode problem. Yes, maybe you can come up with a license that would unambiguously allow the above two uses, but there will be cases where it will be in OSM's interests to bend the rules, and we must provide a mechanism that allows this. There are negative sides to a copyright assignment. A) We probably wouldn't get one from e.g. AND or MASSGIS (although I'm speculating). B) It would mean the scenario I mentioned to Frederik, where a commercial company could sue a license violator, couldn't happen, because they would no longer be the copyright holder. Gerv ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Progressing OSM to a new dataLicence regime
My apologies but the DBL text seems to be mis-formatted -- probably as a result of my last wordpress update. It should be fixed now, but just in case the downloads offer the canonical version. Thanks! ~Jordan Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM jordan at opencontentlawyer dot com OC Blog: http://opencontentlawyer.com IP/IT Blog: http://twitchgamer.net Open Data Commons http://opendatacommons.org Usage of Creative Commons by cultural heritage organisations http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/studies/cc2007 ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Progressing OSM to a new dataLicence regime
Jordan S Hatcher wrote: I'd like to note that, just to clarify, factual data is generally not copyrightable, and so there would be nothing to assign. Why is it that we are assuming (and I'm not just saying this to Jordan) that the individual nodes and ways in OSM are factual data? I don't think that's true, at least not for everything. When I trace a road, there is a creative process going on. I decide where to place nodes to best represent the road without using too many, and so on. There's certainly a creative element. Multiply that by millions of roads... Something like a list of road names or perhaps a GPX track would be factual data, sure. But not all data in OSM is like that. -- Copyright probably protects copying (and other restricted acts) the entire database and (to varying degrees only parts of the database) but doesn't say much of anything about taking all the data and creating a new database -- Database rights in Europe protect extracting and re-utlising substantial amounts of the data apart from the database (so sucking out all the data and creating a new database). -- Outside of Europe, you are likely to rely on contract and other law (possibly unfair competition claims). Contract claims are one-to- one (in personam) and not one-against-everyone (in rem). This means that it is harder to enforce your claims against people who received the (uncopyrightable) data from someone who breached the contract. So if a disaffected insider in a mapping company anonymously sends OSM in the US a copy of their database and we used it on a US-hosted copy of OSM, they couldn't come after us on these grounds? Could they come after us on any grounds? In the protocol, FAQ, and other venues, Science Commons argues: -- People think that copyright protects actions with databases that it doesn't (such as getting all the data out and creating a new database) -- What copyright does and doesn't protect in a database is really tricky, even for IP experts, and so making the public try to parse all the minute legal questions is overly burdensome and expensive both in money (lawyer fees), time (spent wondering about the rights), and lost opportunity (not using the database because of all the hassle) Which is why we are using the FIL, right? The economic impact of the “sui generis” right on database production is unproven. Introduced to stimulate the production of databases in Europe, the new instrument has had no proven impact on the production of databases. *** Is “sui generis” protection therefore necessary for a thriving database industry? The empirical evidence, at this stage, casts doubts on this necessity. So what protection is available in Europe for these database vendors? If the answer is none, then why are more copies of proprietary databases not floating around the web? There has been some discussion of commercial data providers on this list. I'm no expert in their practices, but they rely on: -- IP rights such as copyright and database rights -- contracts that prohibit re-distribution So far, that's the same as our proposal, then? (Our contract doesn't prohibit redistribution, but it does prohibit other behaviours. Is there law to suggest that a non-redistribution clause has more legal force than other types of clause?) **-- marketing, branding, trade marks (and so on) that identify them as a quality source of information We can certainly do that :-) I think it's important to point out that commercial companies protecting their data do not allow their users to share it, and so most of their protection is based around this. By allowing others to share the work freely, you lose many of these avenues of protection (like technical protection measures, for example). This seems like equivocation on the word protection. Your first use means restricting copying, and so your first clause is a tautology. The last use means something wider. OSM is looking for protection in the sense of legally-enforceable restrictions. Commercial mapping companies make no redistribution one of their restrictions, but we don't. However, I don't see why that should reduce the force of the legal mechanisms they and we can use to enforce our restrictions. Gerv ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Progressing OSM to a new dataLicence regime
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Gervase Markham wrote: | Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote: | Long term, we can avoid the ambiguity by making it clear that all data | belongs to OSM, whoever that is (probably the foundation), then we can | let the foundation change the license whenever they need to. | | This would be a copyright assignment, which would be a large change in | the relationship between the participants and the project. As far as I | understand it, it hasn't even been proposed. It's been proposed by me several times in the past. I think it's essential. I don't know of a similar major project that doesn't do some kind of assignment. Wikipedia is the nearest, but Wikipedia is a collection of articles that all stand on their own. We need a situation where someone can say Yes when an enquiry comes in, not hire a lawyer to look at license XYZ. Otherwise the data is useless for many purposes that everyone would agree it should be allowed for. For example, a while ago, ITN news needed a map of Baghdad. No one could say for sure how much of the TV buletin they would have to release CC-by-sa in order to allow them to do that. Looking back at that now, probably only the final ITN styled bitmap image that is shown on the screen, but the designers of ITN's style guidelines probably haven't licensed ITN to release them. If the foundation owned the data, they could say to ITN just show a logo and www.openstreetmap.org in the corner at some point, and everyone would be happy. Another example: it would be great if an npemap type system could be used with OSM maps to derive a free postcode database, but license incompatibilities make that impossible. This is insane. Obviously if that went to any kind of vote, the foundation would allow that, but they don't currently have the power to allow it. Yes, maybe you can come up with a license that would unambiguously allow the above two uses, but there will be cases where it will be in OSM's interests to bend the rules, and we must provide a mechanism that allows this. Robert (Jamie) Munro -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHqlXaz+aYVHdncI0RAruLAKDFMC5/F21mdMJbU/mc5Q8WdeSygwCfQG3n JRVeGK62lCSlh9J8oSfnPIw= =sIHk -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
