[Imports-us] Union County Georgia Building Footprints

[Paul Norman]

Going from the general issues with PD back to the specific case here, I'd
suggest that they provide a statement that the data is public domain and has
no restrictions placed on it. When a government goes on record as saying
that a particular dataset is public domain, we generally have taken them at
their word, as they're the ones best positioned to understand their specific
legal situation. For an individual, I'd be more reluctant and want something
like CC0, or for jurisdictions with database rights, PDDL.

 

As Richard commented, we really need to see some sample data to spot
problems. Could you upload a sample .osm file somewhere (web host, dropbox,
etc)?

 

From: Serge Wroclawski [mailto:emacsen at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2013 3:47 PM
To: Randal Hale
Cc: Imports US
Subject: Re: [Imports-us] Union County Georgia Building Footprints

 

On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Randal Hale
<rjhale at northrivergeographic.com> wrote:

If we are drinking beer there is no way I'm talking about licensing of data.


 

So help me out here - I'm looking at Creative commons and I see 6 licenses -
I assume you are talking about CC-By. Originally OSM was CCbySA correct?

 

I'm talking about CC0: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_use_for_data

As Jason points out, you can use a public domain declaration instead, since
there aren't jurisdiction issues to worry about.

> I think it would help if someone had a list of licenses up that blend well
with ODBL - in my line of work security 
> is the big thing (i.e. don't let anyone else see this) - licensing not so
much. 

This is a non-trivial task that requires lawyers to be definitive. The Open
Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation both put in effort in
this area for software, and I can tell you that it's a ton of work. The
problem is that government agencies typically don't just want to use a
standard license (such as CC0), they want to make their own, or they will
say things "This work is in the public domain, but you must attribute us."-
which is legally impossible, since Public Domain has no restrictions
whatsoever- so once you add any restrictions, it's no longer public domain.

The solution to this is to use a very liberal, standard license like CC0.

> If they licensed this ODBL and I stuck into OSM would that be like
dividing by 0?

 

The issue of license compatibility from external data sources is tricky. For
example, for data that was under CC-BY-SA (the previous OSM license), some
of it had to be removed from OSM because when OSM moved to ODbL, the
CC-BY-SA data couldn't go along with it. The current license we use is OdBL
1.0, but it is conceivable that in 10 years, a new license would be better.
The Contributor Terms say that when you contribute to OSM, you are saying
that you have ownership of the data, or at least have the rights to use the
data in OSM, but if the data has a very specific license which cannot be
modified, then problems can arise.

If you have questions about these issues, the right place for them is the
License Working Group, which has access to attorneys.

- Serge

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