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

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Thu Nov 18 16:42:34 GMT 2010


Rob Myers <rob at ...> writes:

>>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'.
>
>They can fairly be described as CC because you can exercise all the 
>rights that the CC licence grants you over the CC-licenced work.
>
>If you use a CC licenced work to recreate another, non-CC-licenced work, 
>for example if you rearrange it to make the score and lyrics to a Lady 
>Gaga song then record that, the work that you have "reverse engineered" 
>still breaks copyright despite the fact that you have used a CC licenced 
>work to make it.

Uh... which would, in my way of thinking, mean that it is impossible to
produce a CC-licensed score and lyrics of a Lady Gaga song.  You can make an
'all rights reserved' version, by agreement with the record company, but you
cannot release a CC or public domain version.  Similarly, you cannot release
a CC or public domain set of map tiles from an ODbL map.  Perhaps this is just
a difference in terminology.

>>>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;

>It's enforcable for much the same reason that if you send ten of your 
>friends a few seconds of a Lady Gaga song and they put them back 
>together to make the original track, whether they realise it or not the 
>copyright on it hasn't magically vanished.

Right.  But if the music publisher had given permission (perhaps by some
tortuously worded licence document) to release those short clips under CC-BY
then you would be within your rights to put them together into a longer work.

You would not imagine the record company saying on the one hand 'yes, you can
make short clips of our music and release them as CC-BY' but on the other hand
'no, if you try to exercise the rights granted by the CC-BY licence you are
infringing our copyright and must stop'.  Either position is possible, but not
both together.

>And do look at Jordan's "Secret Sauce" explanation again.

He explained that 'I see the data layer as being potentially different from the
rest of what is being licensed CC-BY-SA in a "produced work"'.

However this doesn't really square with your assertion that it's a question of
copyright (rather than some effect of contract law or 'agreeing' to the ODbL).
The CC-BY-SA licence explicitly grants a copyright licence, so if there is any
copyright interest in the printed map produced, it is licensed by those terms.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>




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