[OSM-legal-talk] Potential huge License violation - anyone know anything about this?

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Thu Jun 3 09:23:36 BST 2010


On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Phil Monger <philm94 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, Frederik, here is a challenge:
> -Work out a 10 mile cycle trip or walk around your town / city, taking
> advantage of sights you want to see, streets you know are good for it, ect.
> Cycle it once or twice, getting distracted and taking twice as long as
> needed to take photographs on the way round.
> - Write a concise, *accurate* and thorough description of the route,
> directions and distances.
> - Do not refer to a map for part 2.
> As soon as you use OSM for any of what's in point 2 then your work is
> dependent on OSM, and therefore derivative, for all the same reasons we
> can't check the spelling of a street on Google maps, they can't lift street
> names, turns and distances from OSM. Since they don't credit anyone else for
> this data verification they must have checked it all against OSM.
> This is where the headache sets in, frankly. Some sections, paragraphs and
> sentences are derivative, and others (advice on cycle hire) is clearly not.
> Where do you break it down? "lower two thirds of this page CC-BY-SA"? The
> only acceptable solution is to look at the piece of work as a whole and ask
> :
> "Is this piece of work, in whole, dependent on the data?"
> To which I firmly believe it is.

If you have any evidence that the paragraphs in question are derived
from the maps, then I'd love to see said evidence. Otherwise, it seems
to me you are making allegations that they have committed an offence,
and I'd advise you to be cautious.

And frankly, if I was to write a guide to a cycle route, and look at a
map while I was writing it, it wouldn't mean that it was derived
and/or infringing that map. That is a preposterous overreach of
"derived works". I could as well say that I'm copyrighting this email,
and any response from you referring to parts of this email or any
concepts expressed within means you are making a derived work and owe
me a billion pounds.

The maps are derived from OSM data. The text is clearly not. And OSM
does not exist as a back-channel to attempt to CC license all cycle
route guide books - we are a map project, not a bunch of zealots.

Lord help us when this thread ranks top in Google for "I want to make
a guidebook with OSM maps in it".

Cheers,
Andy




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