[OSM-legal-talk] Reverse-Engineering Maps and Share-Alike Licences

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Gervase Markham wrote:
> So what can be done? I agree that reverse engineering is a risk. Life is 
> not perfect. But still, my suggestion is that we should abandon the idea 
> of trying to prevent reverse engineering, for the following reasons:
> 
> a) GPL and CC-BY-SA compatibility of produced works is more important.
> 
> b) If people are reverse-engineering our stuff, either they need a 
> massive, sustained, continuous Mechanical Turk effort, or their map will 
> be out of date anyway.

I agree with both points, but I would like to try and be pragmatic: 
Don't throw out the reverse engineering clause; just add a clause that 
explicitly permits releasing Produced Works under a number of named 
share-alike licenses.

I think this gives us the best mix. Reverse engineering will be 
possible, but only from share-alike licensed Produced Works. This makes 
it impossible to create an "all rights reserved" produced work and 
reverse engineer from that; any reverse engineering will be through a
share-alike licensed work, and the resulting database will by protected 
by the share-alike license in question.

This means one of two things:

(1) If you are of the opinion that copyright does not work for OSM data 
anyway and only database/contract law can protect it, then the reverse 
engineering will release OSM from clutch of the database right and into 
the fully unrestricted world. In this case, our situation is not 
*better* than today but it is not worse either.

(2) If you are of the opinion that copyright does indeed work for OSM 
data then the reverse engineering amounts to a conversion from one 
share-alike type of license to another, which is no big deal.

Anyone driving a reverse-engineering effort wold have to invest a lot of 
money and in the end all he gets is (at best) an OSM dataset licensed 
exactly as it is today. Great win!

See also:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Suggested_Changes#Possible_solution_.231:_Explicitly_allow_popular_SA_licenses

Bye
Frederik

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