[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL: incompatibility issues

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

80n wrote:
> I can imagine a scenario where, for example, Google uses Amazon's Mechanical
> Turk to pay lots of people to use Map Maker to trace from OSM's rendered
> tiles.

Is this a scenario we could try to fight when it happens, instead of 
complicating things upfront, or would it be too late then?

My opinion is that if OSM were non-changing, one could say we need to be 
cautions because once the data is leaked beyond our control then that's 
it. But since OSM is changing, and (IMHO) our database is worth little 
without the steady stream of changes, we can risk such a "leak" because 
we always have the power to cut off the updates and thus render the 
leaked data next to worthless after a short time.

If we leave everything as it is (saying that Produced Works need to be 
accompanied by a rule that reverse engineering triggers ODbL - assuming 
for a moment that this is the license's intent, Gustav has rightly said 
that we should seek clarification on that), but we add a clause saying:

"This license explicitly allows the distribution of a Produced Work 
under any of the following licenses: GPL v2 or later, GFDL, CC-SA, 
CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-SA-NC. In addition, a Produced Work may be distributed 
under any other license that complies with the requirements set forth in 
this license."

- then this would make it possible to create a Produced Work that mixes 
OSM data and, say, CC-BY-SA data; your above scenario would still be 
possible, but it should be reasonably unattractive for a commercial 
entity to spend a vast amount of money to finally have a collection of 
data that is CC-BY-SA or GFDL licensed. And if it should happen and be 
used for a purpose that we don't like then we simply create ODbL v1.1 
which prohibits exactly that.

Bye
Frederik