[OSM-legal-talk] selling map images
Dair Grant
dair at refnum.com
Thu Oct 25 09:49:49 BST 2007
Frederik Ramm wrote:
>There was talk at SOTM'07 to somehow send a letter to every
>contributor asking them to agree to "the OSM project"/"foundation"
>being identified as the licensor under BY rules (instead of the
>contributor himself). We would then have deleted all data
>contributed by people who don't agree and afterwards be in a
>position to give you a legally watertight "yes" in answer to your
>above question.
I think this would be a very useful step, as the more time goes
on (and the more people contribute) the harder it gets. Making
that happen would be up to the foundation I think, as they have
the list of contributors.
Personally I would prefer the licence to be PD, or something
clearer than CC-by-SA, but a licence change has a similar
problem (the longer you wait, the harder it gets).
The problem I have with CC-by-SA is that the distinction between
"using" and "deriving" isn't clear enough.
E.g., say I take the OSM data and transcode it to a proprietary
format, then sell those blobs of data to people (without
changing the content of the OSM data, simply re-encoding it).
I also sell a viewer which can render map data (either
re-rencoded from OSM, or licenced from commercial sources),
producing a rendered image which the user can use as one of
several backdrops to some custom markup that sits on top (like
an off-line mashup).
Is that situation "deriving"?
Some people will say yes (you took the OSM data and had to do
something with it to use it in your app), some people will say
no (the OSM _data_ was unchanged, and compressing/re-rendering
doesn't change the fact that it's just a layer in a
set-of-layers-with-pins-on-top application).
For the people that say it is deriving, they'll all have
different points at which they think the derivation happened -
was it when the data was transcoded to any other format, when it
was converted to a proprietary format, when it was sold, when it
was viewed in an app rather than a web page, etc.
-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com http://www.deathvalleycycle.com/
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