For the panel discussion "Why do you contribute to OSM?" one of the questions sought to be understood is "What stops or demotivates you to contribute (more) to OSM?".[1]

My response would be the incorrect application amongst the OSM community of sweat-of-the-brow doctrine in copyright law within jurisdictions it very clearly doesn't apply.[2][3]

I hazard a guess some of this incorrect application comes from large companies becoming involved in OSM, and they've signed unrelated enterprise agreements with the likes of Google, or whoever. Within those agreements there may be private agreements that the companies cannot redistribute data of Google (or whoever) without explicit permission. The companies contributing to OSM don't want to have to navigate this problem when they contribute to OSM and would prefer OSM incorrectly applies sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to exclude any non-copyrightable but otherwise "problematic" data (to themselves only) that the likes of Google could possibly argue were obtained through their enterprise agreement.

I also hazard a guess there are numerous OSM community members that strongly hold copy-left views of their contributions. They want/need the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to be able to control consumers of OSM data (not necessarily just rendered tile maps) as in the example of [5]. In this example, someone complains that a third party brand extracted 100k+ water tap coordinates from OSM and added them to Google Maps.

I also hazard a guess there are some small number of vocal OSM community members that hate "armchair mapping", or want to keep new mappers out of areas they're trying to control, and raising licensing disputes can be a convenient way to encourage such mappers to stay away. If the mapper disputes the claim, it'll probably just fall back to "None of are lawyers so we err on the side of extreme caution". And hence tragedy of the anticommons tends to result.

Some ridiculous examples I've come across:

- Franchise website lists store locations with Google Maps Place IDs only. OSM community members get in a panic because someone opened up every link to determine the address or coordinates of each store, then add store locations to OSM. Somehow they fear a copyright infringement has occurred, even though case law in most major jurisdictions very clearly demonstrates factual data (such as address of a store or coordinates of a store) is not copyrightable.

- Government department publishes some dataset, let's say a shapefile of points of park benches, under a CC-BY licence. They then host public competitions and conferences encouraging people to use the data and create apps and websites based on it. OSM community members panic because the government department hasn't also signed an OSM-specific form or otherwise provided approval that explicitly permits OSM's website to show attribution as just "OSM contributors" with a link to a page that lists the government department amongst 100's of others. As opposed to the bottom of openstreetmap.org having a list of 100,000+ individual contributors. No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place. And the government department never responds to a request to clarify how they should be attributed because no one thought of that question when using the CC-BY license.

- Someone on the ground walks past a restaurant with opening hours published on the window and enters them into OSM. Or they visit the restaurant's website to learn what their opening hours are, and enters them into OSM. Oh no! Has there been a copyright infringement?

As far as I'm aware, [4] is probably the most official OSM position resolving some of these sweat-of-the-brow problems. However, other OSM Foundation and Wiki pages are in conflict and would typically scare many community members away from contributing per the examples provided above (e.g. contain strong vague statements such as (paraphrased) "Do not copy features from other maps to OSM"). Additionally, the example of [5] indicates OSM chasing up consumers of OSM data for supposed lack of attribution, and seemingly relying on non-existent (in many jurisdictions) sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to do so.

Copyright law is severley broken with the invention of AI so I guess we'll have to wait and see how jurisdictions change their copyright laws for AI. And then by extension, maybe some of these sweat-of-the-brow ambiguities for mapping/databases may finally be better resolved.

[1] https://2026.stateofthemap.org/sessions/GXXCFE/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

[4] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut...

[5] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut...

State of the Map 2026