Supposed reason for licence change

Posted Jul 28, 2012 17:01 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Supposed reason for licence change by epa
Parent article: OpenStreetMap bot removes waypoints after licensing change (The H)

It's a pity the rest of the OSM community and quite a lot of lawyers disagree with you then.

Supposed reason for licence change

Posted Jul 30, 2012 9:23 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

FWIW, I discussed this research with the OSMF's licence working group before and after. The LWG members did not disagree with the findings - one even went as far as to say that the supposed inapplicability of CC-BY-SA was not, after all, the main reason for the licence change. There were some queries which I asked the lawyers to address, the main one being whether the New York judgement cited by them was a strong enough precedent. The US lawyers agreed that it is not perfect, but "it's what we have", since there is not a large body of case law relating to computer-readable map data.

The two US law firms employed did not want me to distribute the full report publicly because of privilege issues. I do not agree with that but I went along at their insistence. That is why the version linked above is only a summary. If you are interested I would be happy to send you the full research which cites the relevant cases and arguments.

Supposed reason for licence change

Posted Aug 2, 2012 22:17 UTC (Thu) by ElCapitano (guest, #86078) [Link] (1 responses)

Certainly it would be interesting to see the unedited brief which you gave to these lawyers. I don't believe there's anything preventing you publishing that.

Supposed reason for licence change

Posted Aug 3, 2012 10:42 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I gave my word that I wouldn't publish it, but we agreed that I could share it with individuals. You can see my email address in the thread on the legal-talk mailing list I linked to above - please contact me and I'll send you a copy.