[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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