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

[80n]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Dave Stubbs <osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk>wrote:

> 2009/3/8 Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com>:
> > On 7 Mar 2009, at 23:56, OJ W <ojwlists at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:10 PM, Gervase Markham <gerv-
> >> gmane at gerv.net> wrote:
> >>> b) If people are reverse-engineering our stuff,  they need a
> >>> massive, sustained, continuous Mechanical Turk effort
> >>
> >> unless they create SVG files that just happen to contain the same data
> >> as OSM files and we add a loophole that says SVG files are a derived
> >> work instead of a database, thus allowing wtfyw license to be applied.
> >
> > My evil alter ego would be quite interested in developing a version of
> > the cycle map that whilst looking a bit strange just so happened to be
> > quite easy to run OMR over.
> >
> > Perhaps Dave's evil alter ego would find writing such an Optical Map
> > Recogniser interesting...
>
>
> Yes. The "OMR". Pass in a tile png with full path and the magic box
> reverse engineers it. Any network activity to openstreetmap.org is
> entirely coincidental. Hey, he is evil you know.
>
> The bar for creating a Produced Work is very low.  As far as I can tell
from the definition in the license [1] all you have to do is declare that
something *is* a Produced Work to then be able to license as such.

Obviously you can create an image and license it as a Produced Work.  Also
fairly obviously you claim that a vector image (eg SVG) is a Produced Work,
even if it contains most of planet.xml in unmodified form.  Since the
license sets no criteria or test for a Produced Work you can extrapolate
this back to the point where a valid Produced Work is virtually
indistinguishable from a planet file.

As it stands, this is not too much of a problem because the moment you try
to operate on it the reverse engineering clause kicks in and you have the
full weight of the ODbL applied.

However, if you exempt the reverse engineering clause for certain
share-alike licenses then it becomes trivial to relicense the whole OSM
database under such a license, you don't need OMR or any other complex
process.

80n


[1] "Produced Work" – Means using this Database, a Derivative Database, or
this Database as part of a Collective Database to produce the whole or a
Substantial part of the Data (via a search or other query) that is then
either used to create a work (such as producing images, audiovisual
material, text, or sounds) or combined with information from one or more
sources to create an integrated work (such as producing images, audiovisual
material, text, or sounds).
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