Dear Elmar,
2. Maintainer created by LIR - bound by LIR contract.
Not agreed. A lot of maintainers are pretty old, the link to the LIR (who may as well have gone out of business years ago) is not necessarily existent anymore. Moreover, a lot of maintainers have been created in order to relieve the LIR of the maintainance of customer objects (for customers who want to do that themselves). And, on another leg entirely, there isn't necessarily a special contract between LIR and customer that covers RIPE DB updates / maintainer issues. I don't see how the maintainer's owner would be bound by RIPE-LIR contracts.
You are right. I was thinking here mainly of the future (i.e. not about the already existing objects). A way to solve the problem of old objects is to keep track of maintainers we know are bound by a contract and those that are not. Eventually, we may have to treat in some special way those personal objects that are not maintained by maintainers bound by a contract. For example we may have to hide them, delete them, etc. Probably hiding the data is better, as we can re-publish it if we can get the contract with the maintainer.
You will not be able to reach all (or even a majority) of maintainers in your lifetime. This is a hopeless case, I'm afraid.
I fully agree with you. This is somewhat similar to signing the new service contract with all members. In last phase we still had 2-3% of the existing members who did not give any sign of life and we had to cancel the contract with them. I think we can have a similar approach here, we will eventually have to delete "doubtful" data, i.e. data we are not sure we arte allowed to keep in the database.
If you are happy with like 50%, then it's doable.
I am afraid we have no other choice. Best regards, Janos