[OSM-legal-talk] Circumnavigating Share-Alike through software / now and future

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    say you have a super-secret database with property prices that you 
only want to give to paying customers.

Say you want to offer your customers to combine this with OpenStreetMap 
data, and ultimately make a PDF paper that has some coloured maps in it.

By the current license, if you make the PDF yourself and give it to the 
customer, then you are distributing a derived work that falls under 
share-alike. You are not allowed to contractually force the customer to 
keep it under the lid - your data gets out into the open.

If you instead give the customer a heavily DRMed and encrypted version 
of your data, together with some decryption/processing software and with 
an OSM data file, and make it so that the PDF is generated on the 
customer's computer, then you have moved the creation of the derived 
work one step down the chain; you can now license your software and data 
any way you like, and you can also deny your customer the right to 
distribute the derived work that he inevitably creates when running the 
software.

Is this a correct representation of the status quo?

If no, then please correct me.

If yes, then does everybody agrees this is not something we want? I see 
an incentive to build *more* instead of less proprietary software and 
DRM'ed datasets here, and for the end-user everything becomes more 
complex *and* a licensing minefield.

Does the proposed new license suffer from the same problem, and if so, 
can/should something be done about it?

Bye
Frederik

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