Hi all, I am back to trying to get my head around ODbL. I am now wondering about attribution and the viral nature of it. Apologies if this has been raised before. Many licenses have a term stating the copyright notice must be preserved (ignoring for a moment that copyright is probably not approprate for databases). Examples include the X11 license and the CC-BY license (term 4b in http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode). From memory, CC-BY-SA also has this condition, but I am not certain. Ok, so we might create a produced work and release it under the public domain. I could foresee a scenario:
1) Create a produced work under ODbL term 4.3 with proper attribution 2) Release produced work as public domain with proper attribution 3) Strip off legal notices and attribution (which I think is allowed, almost by definition, for public domain works) 4) Republish as public domain or any other license, without attribution My question: where is the term that copyright notices must be preserved done the chain of derived works? ODbL term 4.3 only protects us as far as step 1 in the above example. And if we must insist on attribution being retained, are we saying we can't release ODbL produced works into the public domain? The use case touches on this issue but mainly with respect to trying to reverse engineer the database. I think attribution is a separate issue. The comment in the use case document pretty much implies that this could be an issue. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases#Using_OSM_data_in_a_raster_map_for_a_book.2C_newsletter.2C_website.2C_blog_or_similar_work Second issue, which is probably the flip side of the same coin: people might be inclined to use works that use some sort of attribution license and incorperate them into OSM (this almost certainly has already happened, OS opendata, etc). The attribution must be included in any derived works. Now this seems incompatible with the contributor terms, which grants OSMF an unlimited license. So, I can't add any "viral attribution" data via the contributor terms, as OSMF might one day try to change its attribution terms, since it is not bound to only use ODbL. It would seem to be that the contributor terms would at least put the viral attribution condition on the OSMF. The worst case scenario is the contributor terms cannot accept any data with an attribution condition. Hopefully that is not the case! Is that interpretation any way valid, interesting, cross eyed? If the answer is already out there, just link to it. Thanks! TimSC _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
