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

[Frederik Ramm]

Richard,

    regarding your quoting from the license. Firstly:

 > "4.5... c. Use of a Derivative Database wholly internally to an
 > organisation is not to the public and therefore does not fall under
 > the requirements of Section 4.4."

I think that "wholly internally to an organisation" has exactly the kind 
of ambiguity that I wanted to avoid.

If you have your organisation's books checked by an auditing firm, then 
your books are still "wholly internal to your organisation", or at least 
they are more "wholly internal to your organisation" than "public", right?

On the other hand, I don't know what the word "public" means to a native 
speaker exactly, but my feeling would be that any type of restricted 
access is *not* public. E.g. if I make a derived database and give it 
only to three customers of mine, this is surely not a service I am 
offering "to the public".

By speaking of "public" on one hand and "wholly internally" on the 
other, the license seems to omit those cases where (a) the use is still 
internal but involves work from someone else, like the print shop or the 
auditing example, and those where (b) the use is not really "public" but 
still takes the form of distributing a product to one or more people or 
organisations.

If would expect (a) not to trigger the share-alike element, and (b) to 
do so.

I don't know if it is even possible to write down a sharp distinction 
between the two cases, but for me there is a world of difference between 
(a) giving a data base to someone whom I pay to do something with it for 
me - as if he were my employee, and (b) giving a data base to a customer 
to use as he pleases.

Bye
Frederik

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