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

[Andrew Turner]

Hi all - I apologize for not responding to this sooner on the list.

As Frederick pointed out - we are entirely OSM friendly, and for those
of you that know us, we are long time members and proponents of the
community. GeoCommons is not trying to violate any licenses or claim
ownership any data. In fact, when Sean talked with people at SOTM,
there was great interest in having our data team make the shapefiles
easily available via Finder! and also do various extractions of POI's
for individual download as Shapefile, CSV, and KML.

In general, OSM should be encouraging people to use the data, and via
whatever (and many varied) channels as appropriate that will fit into
people's existing toolchains. Some users want full metadata (be it
FGDC, ISO, or Microformat) and aren't too comfortable with FTP
directory listings.

Frederick was correct in pointing out the data is not the most current
- this is 1) a limitation of the current system where datasets are
'snapshots', but also 2) some known time and completeness snapshot
that can be easily referenced by potential users. I totally agree that
advanced consumers of the data should go to OSM to get updated data,
and the datasets have links to the GeoFabrik FTP for updates - but
realize that is a leap in capability and time investment to go from
click download to sorting through directories, or downloading Planet
dumps and using tools.

More responses below:

> On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, 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. OSM
> > data is originally licensed with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
> > 2.0. So, it looks like they are violating OSM license.
> >

We're actually not violating the license. I agree that the line about
"This data is licensed..." wording is potentially unclear. That really
should say "This metadata and repository is licensed..." and that
datasets themselves are subject to various licenses the user should
follow.

However regarding what is currently stated; we are attributing the
source - and we are sharing any modifications back out. "Cleaned"
data, or altered, does not require submission back into the OSM
database, but just merely redistribution. I'm in general agreement
that it's "nice" and preferable for this to go back to OSM-proper, but
that that's not a requirement, and unfortunately one that would
currently have a low priority. The idea of our cleaning data is quite
a blanket statement, and I don't believe we actually modified any of
the data here - just uploaded it and also I think there was some work
on extraction of POI's as I mentioned above.

> > 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.
> >
> > Should I ask them to remove the data?

This was actually a big surprise to us. As a entire supporter,
advocate, and member of OSM - I understand the issues here. However,
it is not good that the modus operandi of OSM'ers is to first send
"take down" notices to groups that are nominally trying to help but
may have a slight issue. I strongly recommend that any first contacts
be much more friendly, point out potential issues and offer reasonings
and a way to enter into discussion to do things correctly.

You will scare away potential help, and also get a perception to that
of the GNU Project (which does great things, but is also perceived as
dogmatic rather than pragmatic and helpful). The OSM project is built
on people talking and building a community - it's not a time to turn
into a die-hard organization that shouts before it's talks.

Please let me know what you think - our action from this will be to
slightly change the wording on our license description on the bottom
of the page to make it more clear what we're actually releasing under
CC-By-Attr.

And if you're in the Washington, DC area - there's a mapping party
this weekend at our place :)

Thanks!
Andrew

-- 
Andrew Turner
mobile: 248.982.3609
andrew at fortiusone.com
http://highearthorbit.com

http://geocommons.com           Helping build the Geospatial Web
Introduction to Neogeography - http://oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography