What Do Recent Creative Commons and OSM Blog Posts Suggest?

A license agreement is a complex legal document. It is used for more than just transferring intellectual property rights; it is also a mechanism to allocate various types of risk between the licensor and the licensee. I believe that drafting a license of spatial data is even more complex given some of the unique attributes of spatial data (e.g. that a single data set can be used in a number of different applications even though it may not be suited for all such applications) and some uncertainties of the law in this area (e.g. what is "a reasonable expectation of privacy" from a location standpoint?). As a result, I have been closely following the development of the OpenStreetMap license and push to use the Creative Commons suite of licenses for spatial data.

Both camps recently issued blog posts (CC blog post; OSM blog post) that were surprisingly defensive in tone, particularly given how certain they, or at least their proponents are, in their respective missions. Looking past the tone however, what one sees (or at least what I see) is that licensors are pushing back on the "one size fits all" model. It will be interesting to see whether this is true and if so whether this trend will continue.