On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Dave Stubbs <osm.l...@randomjunk.co.uk>wrote:
> 2009/3/4 80n <80n...@gmail.com>: > > On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> wrote: > >> > >> You have discussed some elaborate plans about what data from a > >> non-relicensing > >> contributor would have to be deleted and what would have to be kept. > >> > >> In the worst case, in the event of a dispute, do you really fancy trying > >> to > >> convince a court of law that the elaborate heuristics you applied are > >> sufficient > >> to make the map completely independent of the work of the users who said > >> 'no'? > >> > >> The only sound rule that can be sure to stand up in court is to delete > all > >> data > >> from the contributors who didn't give explicit permission, and all data > >> that > >> depends on it. Period. > >> > >> You may think this is unnecessarily paranoid. Indeed it is: but if the > >> relicensing exercise doesn't put the project on a legally unassailable > >> footing, > >> it is not worth doing. At the moment we can say with certainty that > 100% > >> of the > >> contributors have clicked 'yes' to an agreement to distribute their > >> changes under > >> CC-BY-SA. Any legal niceties tidied up by a move to a different licence > >> are good > >> to have, all other things being equal, but are hugely outweighed if the > >> data > >> becomes a questionable mishmash of contributions that have agreement, > and > >> those > >> that don't have agreement but pass some odd set of rules we invented > >> ourselves to > >> convince ourselves that we didn't need to get permission. > > > > > > I believe this is a wise approach. OSM is traditionally very > conservative > > about using any data not from a know clean source. On the grand scale > its > > relatively easy to capture map data, the value of a clean database far > > outweighs the risks associated with infringing anyone's copyright. We > > should apply the same degree of conserativism to our CC-BY-SA licensed > data > > as we would to any other copyrighted data. > > > > Perhaps we are thinking about this all wrong. If we considered the ODbL > to > > be a license fork of the project (albeit a friendly from the inside fork) > > then it makes it much easier to think about how all this should happen. > > > > I think the problem here is the statement, "delete all data > from the contributors who didn't give explicit permission, and all data > that > depends on it. Period." > > If only it was that simple. > > There's two options: > > 1) Start again from the first point of time at which someone not > agreeing to the switch contributed data. > > 2) Draw a pragmatic line somewhere to determine what constitutes a > copyrightable derivation from CC-BY-SA data. > > Option 2 is what just about everybody is talking about. They're just > putting the line in different places. > > So the question isn't ever really going to end in a Period. We're > going to have to make a call, and that can be extremely conservative > with large zones of reversion around every contaminated edit, or > extremely aggressive with complex heuristics to determine > "significant" edits, or any point in between. > Most people seem to be aiming for middle ground with object based > reversion only and extremely few heuristics (ie: a zero change edit > doesn't count). Which makes some sense. > But don't kid yourselves it's a simple A or B choice. > If someone were to fork the OSM database and try to make a PD version that only contained contribution from people who had self-declared their content as PD then we'd be right in demanding that they err on the side of caution. It's the same situation for ODbL. The fact that it's us doing this and not "them" is immaterial. 80n > > Dave >
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