[OSM-legal-talk] Best license for future tiles?

[Ed Avis]

Richard Fairhurst <richard at ...> writes:

>>Do you mean to say that the earlier statement is true - that it's not 
>>possible to produce truly public domain, unrestricted map tiles or 
>>printed maps from the ODbL data? 
>
>Yes. ODbL is very clear that there's an attribution requirement (4.3).

Yes, that's right, but I also wanted to ask about the other requirement that
at times has been ascribed to the ODbL: that you cannot reverse-engineer the
produced map tiles, so they cannot be fairly described as CC-BY-SA or CC-BY
or indeed anything other than ODbL or 'all rights reserved'.

Jordan Hatcher appears to support this interpretation in
<http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/odc-discuss/2010-August/000286.html>:

>"For the avoidance of doubt, Extraction or Re-utilisation of the whole or a
>Substantial part of the Contents into a new database is a Derivative Database
>and must comply with Section 4.4."
>
>Systematically extracting data out of Produced Works to recreate the whole
>database, or a substantial part of it, would trigger the Share Alike
>obligation.

Myself, I don't see how this can be enforceable; the ODbL licence text can say
whatever it likes but if someone has received some tiles under CC-BY then they
have not agreed to the ODbL at all (whether or not they are 'notified' of it).
But I am not a lawyer and Jordan H. is.

As a personal view, I don't like this no-reverse-engineering provision at all.
It means making proprietary map tiles is possible, but CC-licensed ones is not.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>