[OSM-legal-talk] selling map images

[rob at robmyers.org]

Quoting Dair Grant <dair at refnum.com>:

> 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.

This is a good idea.

In the mean time, BY-SA 2.0 section 4c says that attribution need only  
be "appropriate" to the medium used and that names need be given only  
if "supplied". It is not appropriate to list hundreds of names on a  
printed map, and OSM's data does not provide names, so there may be  
some wiggle room here. IANAL though.

> The problem I have with CC-by-SA is that the distinction between
> "using" and "deriving" isn't clear enough.

This is a legal distinction, not a distinction from the licence.

All copyright licences therefore have this issue. And whether  
something is a derivative may vary from country to country, or even  
between different jurisdictions in the same country.

OSM have put some guidance as to what they believe constitutes  
derivation in the FAQ.

> 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).

This depends on whether the law believes that a derivative work would  
be created.

The standard of originality in the EU is very low, so possibly.

If the re-encoded format counts as "technological protection measures"  
then you are breaking the licence by distributing the blobs.

> 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"?

The rendered images from OSM data are original works that are created  
from OSM's work so they are a very good example of derivation.

- Rob.