On 6 Feb 2008, at 12:19, Gervase Markham wrote: > >> 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.
Thanks for the comment. You pointed out my use of the word protection [1], which may have been unclear on what I was referring. Protection could be by legal tools or by using other methods (such as the ones I mentioned). My point is that there are other tools beyond contract (legal and otherwise) based around not allowing further re-distribution. -- one cannot rely on passwords and other controls to restrict access to data (protecting it with a physical lock) and give anyone the password, as it defeats the purpose of having a password in the first place. A copyleft data licence can't use passwords to protect its data. This is a non-legal protection not available for open data. -- take trade secret for example. You cannot give everyone information and then claim it is a secret. A commercial company could have data protected by contract that they prohibit further distribution and obligate the user to secrecy for the data. This is a legal protection not available for open data. You also wrote: > OSM is looking for "protection" in the sense of "legally-enforceable > restrictions". I would think that OSM would be looking at all ways of protecting their content in the way they choose best -- be it legal, technical, or otherwise. 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 [1] protection |prəˈtek sh ən| noun the action of protecting someone or something, or the state of being protected _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk