Richard Fairhurst wrote: > > It's everyone else who we have to worry about. In the last couple of > months, I've personally noticed a national railway company, a charity with > a turnover of >£100m, a vast firm of couriers, a magazine publisher, a > book publisher, all infringing our requirements/requests for attribution > and share-alike. (I've spotted these by chance: I don't go out there > looking for this stuff.) Deliberate? In some cases, definitely. You > wouldn't put an entirely fictitious credit to another organisation if you > were just innocent of the niceties. > With the value of the data going up, no doubt, more and more companies will try to infringe the (spirit of the) license. That would be the case even with the strongest license. Take a look for example at the GPL. It has been upheld in several court cases in a variety of jurisdictions and a variety of settings. In contrast, I am not aware of a single court case, where the GPL was deamed unenforceable. So that is kind of the strongest a license can be. Nevertheless one regularly reads about cases where companies large and small deliberately infringe on the GPL. Presumably as they hope that no one will notice or bother to sue them.
So the question is possibly less how many people / companies try to infringe on the license (that probably more reflects the value of the data then the strength of the license), but how do they react once confronted with the infringement, once one threatens legal action and ultimately how the case would be decided in front of court, should it ever get that far. Even though so far there haven't been any significant large scale infringement's, if OSM continues to grow and thrive, eventually there will very likely be one, independent of what license OSM is using. At the moment beyond how people/companies react to "confrontation with infringement" appears unknown for both CC-BY-SA as well as ODbL, although one can hope and expect that ODbL is more enforceable given that it was designed specifically for databases. Btw. Given that there have been several cases of infringement of the license by now, some of which OSMF has been involved in dealing with, what would be the case where there was the most trouble in trying to enforce it and what was their line of argument in their defense? Richard Fairhurst wrote: > > No, Google, Tele Atlas and Navteq aren't infringing OSM's licence. > Everyone else is, though. > Well, indirectly Google has infringed on OSM's license through one of their "subsidiary" data providers (e.g. in Colombia) and I have heard of several alleged other cases, although by the sounds of it, there was not enough evidence to pursue it further. Given the experience with large scale companies infringing on GPL code, it wouldn't surprise me if eventually even Google, Tele Atlas and Navteq would attempt it. However, that would likely take a lot longer. Alone the fact that they would have to admit that OSM has better data then them, is likely a deterrent for quite a while. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/OpenStreetMap-License-Change-Phase-3-Pre-Announcement-tp6266295p6281681.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
