[OSM-legal-talk] Someone already had a look at theBing TermsofUse?

[Andrew Harvey]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 12/21/10 11:51, Andrew Harvey wrote:
>>
>> I am having this conversation because I contribute to OSM on the basis
>> that the database will be licensed CC BY-SA and will not be filled
>> with data which conflicts with that license. If tracings from Bing
>> imagery cannot be distributed under this license, then the OSM
>> community should be made aware of this, so we can treat such edits as
>> vandalism. If tracings from Bing can be distributed under a CC BY-SA
>> license then again the OSM community should be made aware of this so
>> we can use this as a mapping source.
>
> I.e. you are not happy with applying your (rather skewed IMHO)
> interpretation of legal matters to your own work, but you would prefer to
> force it on everyone else in the project, stopping them from using Bing
> until the available documentation matches your personal interpretation, is
> that right?

Sorry I don't understand.

> Have you applied the same rigor to other data sources that were widely
> believed to be usable, e.g. Yahoo?

I think I've only used Yahoo once or twice. This was before I looked
into the legal foundations. Since this, I couldn't find a license from
Yahoo, so I determined that I should not use Yahoo as I'm not

An observation. It seems we have two camps. One like Yahoo and
Microsoft who allegedly say tracing from imagery they serve and
uploading it to OSM is not against their terms of service, and make no
mention of any copyright rights of such works. And another camp like
Nearmap, Landsat, etc. who don't mention anything in their terms of
service, but instead grant the imagery under a license that allows
derivative works to be released under some other CC-BY-SA compatible
license.

My only concern is that for the first case, even though its not
against their terms of service, we still may not have the permissions
from people who are able to grant us a copyright license to use such
data. I see these two things as independent of one another, and I
thought that we need both to be checked before we can use a service
for deriving information. Of course its a real mess because as this is
an international project, some countries may say that tracing does not
create a derivative work so the tracer can use any license (or none)
that they wish, others may say that tracing does create a derivative
work so you need a license from the copyright holder to distribute any
traced data.

I don't know, this is just how I'm seeing it from all the evidence I've seen.