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

[Nic Roets]

In the case where the super-secret database owner does not encourage you to
use OSM-ng license data, there is nothing the license can do. The
super-secret database owner can simply argue that his software was written
for OSM/PD or OSM/CC-by-SA.

Another way frustrate SA will be to reduce the quality (randomize / spam) of
your proprietary data on a per client basis to the extent where the effort
to clean it up will be more than the effort to personally go and collect it.
(I got this idea when so many people said they don't want to be part of this
list).

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
>
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