[OSM-legal-talk] New license: What is publication/distribution?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    there is one other thing I would hope the new license addresses, 
which is very unclear at the moment: When does something count as 
"published"?

The current license says:

"You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly 
digitally perform the Work only under the terms of this License..."

Now I know that some, especially coming from a GNU background, interpret 
"distribution" as follows:

* make something for yourself - not distribution
* give it to your own employees onsite or offsite - not distribution
* give it to a contractor onsite - not distribution
*** give it to a contractor offsite - DISTRIBUTION
* publish or sell it - DISTRIBUTION

All of these are clear except the one marked ***. I believe that this 
reading puts an unnecessary burden on using the data and I would like 
the new license to state explicitly that if you give a derived work to 
someone who works on it for you under a contract then this does not 
constitute publication.

For the current license, the *** rule means that if I make a personal, 
derived work of OSM to hang it on my wall, and give the PDF to a print 
shop to make a nice big printout, this will already count as 
publication, forcing me to put proper attribution on *and* allow anyone 
in the print shop to copy the work even if it was only ever made for my 
living room. The same would apply if I would pay someone to transport a 
derived work for me, or to scrape it off my hard disk after a crash. 
This (to me) is clearly undesirable.

For the new license, the problem is less important because what I will 
be giving to a print shop is more likely to be an "experience" rather 
than a database so the attribution/share-alike requirements will not 
come into force, but still I would like an exact definition of what 
exactly I may do with a derived database *without* activating 
attribution/share-alike - and in my view, giving the database to a 
contractor whom I pay money to do something with it and then return the 
end result to me should *not* put that contractor in a position to do 
whatever he pleases with the data.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"