[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL "virality" questions

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed Oct 7 00:14:05 BST 2009


Hi,

> no-one is suggesting that the extraction of names, locations and IDs
> would be somehow outside of the ODbL. any site using these as lookup
> keys would have to release that data under the ODbL.

[...]

> as a concrete example, let's pretend i have a site, beerintheOSM,
> which rates pubs and allows commenting and photo uploads. if i'm
> storing the reviews linked against pubs linked against OSM
> (name/location/ID), i definitely have to release the
> (name/location/ID) records 

Wait a minute.

If I run "beerintheOSM" as a crowdourced project - say, a Wiki - and 
people can enter new pubs, and the names are entered by those who create 
the entries, and I don't even store lat/lon locations, I just allow my 
users to add an OSM node id in some kind of template which I then use to 
retrieve and display the map for the area, then surely I do not have to 
release the records?

* The name was not taken from OSM
* the location is not even stored in my database
* the OSM ID... well yes this would have to be released but not with 
context, i.e. I could simply release a list of OSM IDs saying "these are 
used in beerintheOSM somewhere

If anyone doubts the above then think what would happen if I didn't use 
the OSM ID to draw a map, instead the OSM ID would just be listed there 
in the text ("by the way, this pub is OSM node #1234") - which is the 
same from a database perspective. Surely such reference cannot trigger 
any viral effect?

Bye
Frederik





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