[OSM-legal-talk] some interesting points from the bing license

[Andrew Harvey]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>>
>> Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>>> I believe there'll be a Bing Maps blog post going up soon on the same
>>> topic.
>>
>> http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/12/01/bing-maps-aerial-imagery-in-openstreetmap.aspx
>>
>> Richard
>
> Some people have already decided that the license offered by Bing, and
> the intent demonstrated by their public statements, is enough to move
> forward.
>
> So here is something interesting.  And it combines several of the
> recent announcements relating to OpenStreetMap.
>
> Today, I put a bug in to Skobbler's OpenStreetBugs system,
> then fixed it using Potlatch 2 on the Open MapQuest site,
> and added some more details with the Bing Imagery(!) shown there.
>
> Open initiatives from both MapQuest and Bing, built upon the work of
> countless OSM contributors and F/LOSS tools, combined in one place to
> help me make an improvement in OpenStreetMap?  I think that's nice to
> see.
>

Am I the only one that sees a problem with the legal foundation of
tracing from Bing imagery? Take a look at how NearMap.com make their
imagery available for tracing. On their website along with the their
license of how their imagery can be used, they include a clause that
allows derivative information to be licensed under {such and such}
license.

If Microsoft have the authority to sublicense the Bing aerial imagery,
then what they should do is add a clause to their existing
license/terms of use that says something along the lines of, we
declare that anyone who derives information from the Bing imagery owns
the copyright (or whatever other rights are needed for one to be free
to user, modify... the information).

I am yet to see a license.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/12/01/bing-maps-aerial-imagery-in-openstreetmap.aspx
is not a license, its just a quote from some guy named SteveC, which
doesn't actually say anything about derivative works and the copyright
of such works.

The only legal terms I could find were at
http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/terms.html but I couldn't find
anything which would allow derived information to be CC BY-SA 2.0
licensed.