[OSM-legal-talk] Lawyer responses to use cases, major problems

[Dair Grant]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> I'm surprised that nobody else seems to see a problem in this. Am I
> perhaps barking up some completely imaginary tree?

Not at all; I am still reading through the draft, and have exactly the same
concern.

It may be I have misunderstood how this is intended to apply, but I think
both 4.6a and 4.6b end up making derivative databases (effectively any
mechanical processing of the original content whatsoever, IMO) problematic.

In many cases, generating "a file containing all of the alterations" will be
at least as much work as making the derivative database available (leaving
aside that publishing these alterations may reveal some proprietary
information, making it less likely for OSM data to be used).

That is not always practical, and if all my transformations are destructive
then I don't think it's even useful (compared to simply making a copy of the
original database available, to ensure the source data is never lost if
openstreetmap.org goes away).


I'm not sure what format "a file containing all of the alterations" would
take. Does this mean a machine-readable list of the exact transformations
that were performed, or simply a human-readable summary of the
transformations made?

If I map our fixed point lat/lons to 32-bit floats, I will create a
derivative database (32-bit floats can't represent all integers exactly, so
I've lost some information and can't go back).

Do I need to publish exactly which floating point value each integer was
mapped to, or simply say "I converted all lat/lons to floats"?

The latter makes more sense, but do I also need to specify that they're IEEE
floats and which of the four IEEE rounding modes were used?


I don't have a better phrasing for 4.6b, but I would like to allow
alterations to be specified as:

  - A literal set of transformations to apply (e.g., a lookup table
    or code that could be executed to apply the transform).

  - A human-readable set of instructions that are "reasonable"

Introducing "reasonable" means I can have my lawyer argue with yours over
whether "convert to floats" is a reasonable summary or not, and not have to
worry about being sued because I used an unusual rounding mode like
round-to-infinity and forgot to mention it.

It also means you can publish "imported into PostGIS using this schema" as
your "alteration", and not have to provide the literal derivative database
created by your particular version of PostGIS when run on a specific
platform/OS.


-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/