[Legal-general] [OSM-talk] Ordnance Survey tries to reinforce its stranglehold over "derived" geographic data in the UK

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Gustav Foseid wrote:
> To me it seems that OS is broadening it's business into the "seriously 
> overstating rights" trade...

It seems to me that in this situation, the bad guys are not the OS but 
Google. Google has recently modified their terms of use, making clear 
that they automatically have rights to any data you display on top of 
Google:

"11.1 Content License.
(a) You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Your 
Content. By submitting, posting or displaying Your Content you give 
Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and 
non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publicly 
perform, publicly display and distribute Your Content."

This means that if someone displays OS data on top of Google, he must 
also be entitled to grant the requested license to Google.

All OS are doing is clarifying that a normal OS customer will probably 
*not* have the right to grant others (Google) a "perpetual, irrevocable, 
worldwide, royalty-free" license.

This is true for OSM as well; my reading is that we must not display OSM 
data (say, a KML file we have generated from our data) on top of a 
Google map, because the above clause would then give Google rights to 
our data which are incompatible with CC-BY-SA.

In conclusion, if someone says the OS is "reinforcing its stranglehold", 
then the CC-BY-SA license forces us to do the same...

Bye
Frederik