[OSM-legal-talk] Possible license violation at geocommons.com

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Kari Pihkala wrote:
> I was browsing through geocommons.com and noticed that they have a lot of
> data extracted from OSM (hundreds of thousands of points). They are
> relicensing the data with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The most stupid thing about this is that someone has obviously taken 
tons of extracts from the Geofabrik website and uploaded them, and now 
Geocommons has this great three month old data sitting around on their 
servers when anyone would be better advised to download fresh daily data 
from Geofabrik.

(Why would people do that? Do the Geocommons people have some sort of 
"you upload more, you get a brighter star" scheme that encourages people 
to do stupid things, or do people do stupid things on their own? Nah, 
don't answer.)

> So, it looks like they are violating OSM license.
> 
> Have a look at
> http://finder.geocommons.com/searches?query=tag%3Aopenstreetmap and the
> license text at the bottom of the page, behind the 'Details' button.

The Geocommons/FortiusOne people are quite sensible and OSM friendly 
normally (SOTM sponsors as well!), so I guess there's no harm intended. 
A quick note should be sufficient for them to correct the mistake.

Bye
Frederik

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