[OSM-legal-talk] INANAL - But these guys are

Nick Black nickblack1 at gmail.com
Tue Feb 27 22:00:20 GMT 2007


On 2/27/07, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> > "Apparently getting away with something" is exactly the kind of legal
> > limbo that frightens off those potential users who have something to
> > lose by getting sued. It may be ok for you. Don't assume it is ok for
> > everybody.
>
> In my opinion, we can find our way only by walking it.  In a court
> of law, lawyers make reference both to written law, previous court
> cases, and to existing, established practices in society and
> business.  Since there is no written law specifically regulating
> how community mapping projects' data can be reused under Creative
> Commons licenses, and very few court cases with regards to CC at
> all, the existing practice would seem all the more important.
>
> The fact that I could get away with this is one important
> observation.  Another important observation is that Multimap could
> get away with using OSM's map of Isle of Wight.

Multimap dont use OSM data of the IoW, Nestoria do - but thats a small
detail.  There are two issues: attribution and derived work.  In some
ways you can argue that Nestoria don't attribute according to the OSM
license as they don't list every contributor on each tile, on the
other hand I am happy for this kind of use of our data, so I would
never support legal action against Nestoria, which would block any
action against them by OSM.  The other point is the derived work
issue, which doesnt apply as nestoria are not deriving anything from
using OSM's data.

Companies like Nestoria and Multimap are pretty forward thinking, they
are both leaders in their  fields and have recognised the potential of
OSM.  Other companies who are not so forward thiking, but are
nonetheless aware of OSM, may see only the data and try to grab all
they can get, without giving anything back to the community.  This is
one of the things that I like about a license that requires
attribution, that we can make people give something back to the
project.  OSM has benifited from the interest of people like Multimap
and Nestoria and whilst these guys would have probably supported the
project if the data was PD (or other non-attribution) licensed, we
could also have been damaged by attempts of other companies to use our
data - as people have already pointed out in this thread.

So far as the frightening of users of our data - I think a lot of that
was caused by the over reaction of the list to Philip's orginal
question about the Baghdad map.  The major difference with Philip's
situation and Lars', is that Lars is Lars and Philip is ITN - I would
imagine a lot of his caution came from not wanting to attract negative
attention within his professional life by violating the OSM license.

Still, this is all good stuff to talk about with the CC guys - and at
that conference thing we're having...

 To assist future
> interpretation (by lawyers or others), we could make a list of
> actual uses that have passed without any known protests.
>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
>


-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net




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