[OSM-legal-talk] Reverse-Engineering Maps and Share-Alike Licences
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sun Mar 8 12:00:58 GMT 2009
Hi,
80n wrote:
> 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.
Not sure here. You can of course produce a Derivative Database and
*claim* it were a Produced Work but my reading always was that as soon
as your work contains anything that is by definition a database then
your work is a Derived Database and *not* a Produced Work. I assumed
that in the absence of a clear definition, the EU definition of
"database" would hold and this would mean that even a PNG file can be
said to be a database (which would be the other extreme and make
Produced Works a niche application). I thus requested, on multiple
occasions, clarification of what *we* want to be a database, and I think
this is definitely something we have to define either in or acommpanying
the license.
See also
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Use_Cases#When_is_something_a_Derivative_Database_when_is_it_a_Produced_Work_and_can_it_be_both.
> 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
We don't want to dual-, triple-, quadruple-license our data that's for
sure, but we're also not hostile to a bunch of share-alike licenses; if
it can be made so that significant effort is required to accomplish the
transition ODbL -> SomeShareAlikeLicense (i.e. the easy route via SVG
would be too easy, but an OMR route would be difficult enough) then I
would be tempted to say: If someone really wants to jump through these
hoops to get it done, let him do it. I think this will be a niche
application and, if at all, only used very seldom.
And if we later find that someone is really being a thorn in our side
with that for one reason or another, *then* we think about fixing it.
(My general opinion is let's fix bugs now before we start rather than at
some undefined point in the future. However in this case I think the
threat is negligible.)
To Simon Ward - my suggestion was to keep the current stuff about
Produced Works (basically: any license you want as long as
no-reverse-enigneering clause is kept), and additionally say that the
reverse-engineering clause may be dropped if the work is to be licensed
under X, Y, or Z. I thought that it would be *easier* (one sentence!) to
write that into the license, rather than trying to define the criteria
that a license must meet to benefit from this exception. - Again with
the thought that if in the future a significant new Share-Alike license
pops up, we can make an amendment to our ODbL to allow that one as well.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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