[OSM-legal-talk] Paid services from OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> "Database" – A collection of Data arranged in a systematic or methodical way 
> and individually accessible by electronic or other means offered under the 
> terms of this Licence. This includes the Database as protected by Database 
> Rights or by copyright and neighbouring rights law.
> 
> A printout is not "individually accesible by electronic means"[1].

But it says "or other means", so it doesn't have to be electronic? In my 
eyes a printed telephone book fits the above description perfectly: It 
is arranged in a systematic way and individually accessible by (other) 
means.

> Now's the point where I have to call the lawyers into the conversation. My 
> *personal* point of view is that, if you use an obscure format (or heavy DRM) 
> on purpose, you're not letting people extract the data.

Agreed for the DRM case; CC-BY-SA explicitly says that DRM is not ok and 
I believe we'll have something similar in the ODBL. Also agreed for 
purposeful obfuscation. But what if obfuscation happens "naturally".

E.g if you look at yournavigation.org which is based on gosmore. There 
is a compiler behind the scenes that makes a highly compressed indexed 
file from OSM data, and that is then used to provide the service. Anyone 
also wanting to provide the service theoretically only needs that highly 
compressed indexed file, but without documentation or the code that 
creates/uses it, it would be really hard to use that file for anything.

Bye
Frederik

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