[OSM-legal-talk] Reverse-Engineering Maps and Share-Alike Licences

[80n]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 80n wrote:
> > Obviously you can create an image and license it as a Produced Work.
> > Also fairly obviously you claim that a vector image (eg SVG) is a
> Produced Work,
> > even if it contains most of planet.xml in unmodified form.
>
> Not sure here. You can of course produce a Derivative Database and
> *claim* it were a Produced Work but my reading always was that as soon
> as your work contains anything that is by definition a database then
> your work is a Derived Database and *not* a Produced Work. I assumed
> that in the absence of a clear definition, the EU definition of
> "database" would hold and this would mean that even a PNG file can be
> said to be a database (which would be the other extreme and make
> Produced Works a niche application). I thus requested, on multiple
> occasions, clarification of what *we* want to be a database, and I think
> this is definitely something we have to define either in or acommpanying
> the license.


I agree that the current form of the license is unclear here.  I don't think
we can rely on the definition of a database to determine what triggers a
Produced Work.

My interpretation was that the publisher gets to choose.  If they publish
something as a database then there's one set of consequences and if they
publish as a Produced Works then there's a different set of consequences.

An SVG file is an excellent example as it could easily be published either
way.

If I publish my SVG file as an ODbL licensed database then everyone gets to
use it and share it as per normal.

Alternatively if I publish it as a Produced Work under the MyWTF license
then anyone can look at it or print it or whatever, but the moment they try
to use it as a database (by looking inside the file) then the reverse
engineering clause kicks in and it's magically an ODbL database once again.

The problem with this though is that if you make an exemption for CC-BY-SA
then you can drive the whole planet file through that loophole.



> See also
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases#When_is_something_a_Derivative_Database_when_is_it_a_Produced_Work_and_can_it_be_both
> .
>
> > However, if you exempt the reverse engineering clause for certain
> > share-alike licenses then it becomes trivial to relicense the whole OSM
> > database under such a license
>
> We don't want to dual-, triple-, quadruple-license our data that's for
> sure, but we're also not hostile to a bunch of share-alike licenses; if
> it can be made so that significant effort is required to accomplish the
> transition ODbL -> SomeShareAlikeLicense (i.e. the easy route via SVG
> would be too easy, but an OMR route would be difficult enough) then I
> would be tempted to say: If someone really wants to jump through these
> hoops to get it done, let him do it. I think this will be a niche
> application and, if at all, only used very seldom.
>

I think any kind of license that relies on something being too hard to do is
probably prone to failure at some point in the future.  After all only 3 or
4 years ago everyone was saying that OSM was too hard to do, and that it was
a crazy project.


>
> And if we later find that someone is really being a thorn in our side
> with that for one reason or another, *then* we think about fixing it.
> (My general opinion is let's fix bugs now before we start rather than at
> some undefined point in the future. However in this case I think the
> threat is negligible.)
>
> To Simon Ward - my suggestion was to keep the current stuff about
> Produced Works (basically: any license you want as long as
> no-reverse-enigneering clause is kept), and additionally say that the
> reverse-engineering clause may be dropped if the work is to be licensed
> under X, Y, or Z. I thought that it would be *easier* (one sentence!) to
> write that into the license, rather than trying to define the criteria
> that a license must meet to benefit from this exception. - Again with
> the thought that if in the future a significant new Share-Alike license
> pops up, we can make an amendment to our ODbL to allow that one as well.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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