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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Rob Myers wrote:
>> My example above did *not* contain distribution of any OSM-derived work.
>> The items that were distributed were (a) proprietary software, (b)
>> proprietary data, and (c) unaltered OSM data.
> 
> (c) is distribution of the original work and so is still covered by
> the licence, notably section 4.a about not restricting the recipient's
> ability to exercise the rights granted by the licence:

Obviously. But I was not talking about restricting the rights of the OSM 
data distributed alongside the proprietary data; the super secret data 
set company would of course allow you to do anything with the OSM 
extract they give you. They would just restrict their own data. Or, in 
CC-BY-SA license terms, they would give you a collective work (a CD-ROM, 
say), that has OSM data and proprietary data sitting alongside each other.

> If we change the scenario so that the end user downloads the OSM data
> themselves from someone other than the proprietary data vendor then
> you may be right. 

Ok, we can make that change; it would probably not be too much to ask 
from the super secret data set company to build some automatic OSM 
downloader into their software.

> My statement about "cannot make..." was phrased too strongly, as Nic
> and you both point out. I meant it in this context of a third party
> trying to force you to make such a derivative.  The end user wishing
> to make their own derivative and not release it is different from the
> third party trying to force you not to release a derivative you have
> made.

That's an interesting point we are getting to here - the distinction 
between the end user creating a derivative of his own volition versus 
the end user being sort-of "guided" (or even tricked?) into making a 
derivative. Probably extremely hard to find sharp wording for. "If you 
create a software with the primary aim of making derived works from OSM 
and another data source, you must make sure that the other data source 
is licensed such that the derived work can be distributed..." - but that 
would go much too far, it would for example make it impossible for 
anyone to write a generic GDAL OSM importer or an OSM importer for 
Google Earth!

In the end this is nothing else than what we're doing with the 
"layering" stuff right now. If someone says they want to display 
proprietary data alongside OSM, our answer is they can use something 
like an OpenLayers interface which we count as a "collected" work where 
each layer may be licensed differently. However, the end product on the 
user's screen is surely a derived work (imagine him making a screenshot 
and publishing it!). This, too, is a case where the creation of the 
derivative is pushed down to the end user: He may view both data sources 
on top of each other, but he may not re-publish what he sees.

Bye
Frederik

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