[OSM-legal-talk] hands on commercial applications
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Thu Jun 19 22:43:56 BST 2008
Mika,
first of all, from a license viewpoint it doesn't matter what you
use the data for (whether you do routing on it or just display it or
whatever). It also doesn't matter what your personal views on the matter
are. You say that you wouldn't like it if someone sold OSM data, but in
fact this is permitted by the license.
The license is simply: When you produce a *derived* work involving OSM
data, the derived work has to be licensed CC-BY-SA (and attributed but
that's the easier part).
What you want to do is make sure you produce a *collected* rather than
derived work, which will enable you to license different parts of it
differently.
A common rule of thumb (by no means legally tested) is separatability
(sp?). If your aeronautical data and the OSM data you distribute can be
easily separated (e.g. two different files on the SD card, osm.dat and
aeronautical.dat) then it is likely that only the osm.dat file is
CC-BY-SA and the aeronautical.dat is whatever you please.
If, on the other hand, everything is mixed and mingled into one giant
database file you produce, then it will be hard to argue that this is a
collected work *even if* you have not actually changed one dataset based
on the other.
(Enabling your customers to upload OSM data to the device by simply
offering some sort of converter software would of course be your safest
bet - if you don't touch OSM data yourself then your data cannot be
infected by the share-alike aspect.)
Be aware however that making a collected work may in some cases just
shift the burden on to your users. For example, imagine you would allow
your users to save the flightpath in a file and later generate a film
sequence that re-plays the in-flight view, and save that as a movie
file. That movie file would contain pictures of aeronautical data and
OSM data and would clearly fall under CC-BY-SA. Supposed your
aeronautical data is under closed licensing, that would mean that you
cannot allow your users to give such animations to anybody as this would
immediately set them free unser CC-BY-SA...
There's a lot of fun to be had with licensing, welcome to the club.
Bye
Frederik
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