[OSM-legal-talk] OSM in travel guide

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Tue Apr 1 18:02:06 BST 2008


Tim Lohnes wrote:

> It will look completely different and have new information added.   
> Sounds like a derivative work as well. What about the new added   
> information that the travel publisher has researched and wants added  
>  (hotels, pubs, etc). Does that operate under the same license   
> structure, meaning other people can copy it. The publisher would   
> certainly balk at that as that is seen as their information that   
> they have researched.

Under the current licence, the difference is that between a  
"Derivative Work" - which has to be licensed as CC-BY-SA - and a  
"Collective Work" - which doesn't.

There's no clear definition of the difference, but as a very rough  
guide, pretty much anything within the borders of the map is  
"Derivative", while the rest of the book is "Collective". So anything  
you add to the map itself has to be CC-BY-SA, but the rest of the book  
doesn't.

This is all under the prevailing interpretation and hasn't been tested.

Now we also have the situation where the "prevailing interpretation"  
also says that you can add different layers to a _web_map of the same  
thing, but they don't have to be CC-BY-SA. This is, in my humble  
opinion, batshit insane and one of the reasons why CC-BY-SA sucks very  
large rocks for geodata. (But, in its notion of "you can separate the  
data", it unwittingly points to something saner.)

We are, of course, actively looking at a new licence - the Open  
Database Licence. It's impossible to get a licence which will answer  
absolutely everything authoritatively (well, apart from PD/BSD-type :)  
), but these things are certainly less ambiguous in the draft ODL, and  
OSMF is supporting a new revision of the ODL which will further  
clarify them.

I'm also working on a travel book with maps which will include some  
OSM data, so feel free to ping me off-list if you want to share  
experiences.

cheers
Richard (personal opinions only, of course)






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