[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"




More information about the legal-talk mailing list