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

[Rob Myers]

On 11/18/2010 04:42 PM, Ed Avis wrote:
> 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

It means that we cannot use (...are still not allowed to use) a 
CC-licenced work to make an infringing work.

> '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.

We can produce a CC licenced set of map tiles from ODbL data. But we 
cannot use those to make a Lady Gaga score or the original ODbL 
database. If we do, the original rights still apply to the recreated 
work. CC licencing is not a way of circumventing that.

What would prevent us from using an ARR map tile to magically recreate 
the original ODbL database?

>>>> 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.

Sure but there's no equivalent to the original database in that example.

If we look at the licencing of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", which 
licenced individual track elements CC but not the original compiled 
work, that's probably closer.

> 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.

Exactly. And the copyright (or DB right) in the original data is an 
entirely separate issue. Which does not interact with your use of the CC 
licenced work, and is also not in any way circumventable using the CC 
licenced work.

- Rob.