[OSM-legal-talk] Re: [OSM-talk] about freedom in PD/BSD/MIT/Apache

[Christopher Schmidt]

After writing this, I re-read some of the existing information on the
wiki, and the creativecommons copyleft license. I'm going to correct
some of the statements in this email with this in mind.

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 07:55:04PM -0400, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> The problem is that it's not legally permissable to use OSM data
> combined with data which is not able to be shared. This means that we
> could not, for example, create an image file which contained
> (appropriately licensed) Ordnance Survey coverage data map combined with
> a map of OSM data coverage. Nor is it possible to make a map of, for
> example, phone book entries on top of OSM data. Nor any of several other
> use cases that OSM could be valuable for.
> 
> If I have images I want a road map on top of, and I don't want to pay
> TeleAtlas licensing fees, I can't use OSM data to make the road maps on
> top of my images, unless I also release the images.

Rather -- unless I license the images under a sharealike license.
Creative COmmons, unlike the GPL, does not require that the data is
released.

 
 
> I will state right now that I have never made a use case of the OSM data
> which complies with the OSM license. In fact, the current
> london.freemap.in demos are violating the OSM license. I have produced
> derivative works of the OSM data that I have not shared. 
Where 'shared' == licensed under the CC-By-SA license. I have not
indicated any license for this data.

> I have taken
> data extracted from another database (OpenGuides) and plotted it on top
> of OSM -- but I didn't share the data that I collected from OpenGuides.
> I've published the tools to do all these things, but I am not sharing
> the underlying data.

Nor am I licensing it in the appropriate way -- nor am I even sure if I
could. The OG data was not, at the time, under the same license as the
OSM data, so I could not release it under 'a license identical to this
one.' as the CC-By-SA human-readable code states you are required to.

> So, if we're going to be strict about requiring copyleft, then I should
> stop my efforts right now. The data underlying the london.freemap.in
> demos is not publicly available -- I'm violating the copyleft terms of
> the OSM license.

This is incorrect. I apologize.

> Is what I'm doing a violation of the spirit of OSM? I don't think so.
> But it's a legal violation of the license under which the data is
> released, as I understand it. Nobody is upset about it -- because it's
> useful, I'd assume. I've never been called on not participating in full
> copyleft -- probably because I've come close enough. 
> 
> But the fact that every demo I've done, some of which people have
> considered hugely useful, is legally a violation of the OSM license as
> my activities stand, seems to me like something that should be taken
> into account when considering what the OSM license should be, in my
> opinion.

This still stands.

Note that I am not attempting to claim copyright on the OSM data, nor am
I saying "please! stop moving towards using the renderer I'm
encouraging", because neither is true. If any of this were to become a
legal or social issue, my first action would be to fully comply with the
license. But I haven't yet, and no one has used that as one of the
myriad of reasons what I've been doing has been a bad idea.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer