[OSM-legal-talk] Is CC-BY is compatible with ODbL/CT?

[Mike Collinson]

At 05:50 PM 22/08/2010, David Groom wrote:
>>Intent:
>>
>>(1) Section 4 always was intended to allow and encourage governmental organisation imports that require attribution under the standard terms without need for derogation.
>>
>>(2) Maintain maximum flexibility for future choices.  The license used in section 3 might vary over the next 100 years due to the freedoms in Section 2 but Section 4 remains immutable.  We attribute our sources but not necessarily force users further down the chain to do so.
>
>If you say "not necessarily force users further down the chain to do so" isn't that a breach CC-BY  terms which, Under 8b, requires "Licensor offers to the recipient a licence to the original Work on the same terms and conditions as the licence granted to You under this Licence" [2 below]. Surely if  we use CC-BY data, we have for require ("force") users "down the line" to attibute it to the origional authors.
>
>David

Yes, that really is the rub, isn't it?

I do not see much of an issue with sideways attributions where a derivative geodata database has been from OSM as the main source. The Deriver copies http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution and uses it appropriately.

Things become difficult when geodata sources really open up and OSM is a major but amongst thousands of geospatial resources and folks will be routinely creating multiple mixed derived databases and them mixing them too.  Governments move on to more realistic licensing but we can't. Oops.  But I may be being pessimistic.

Then there is upwards attribution. Software generally does not demand that a book attribute the word-processor used, the various image packages used to make the picture, how field notes were made ... CC-BY is vague on this as, like CC BY SA, it is not written for databases. Are we really going to have to force any map-maker to acknowledge hundreds of sources because they just might be adding to a particular area??

We seem to be dealing with all this at the moment by simply ignoring it.

Mike

PS http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution only attributes Australian Bureau of Statistics as an Australian source. I've counted at least 6 CC-BY licenses in the import catalogue. :-)