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

Ed Avis eda at waniasset.com
Thu Nov 18 18:50:47 GMT 2010


Anthony <osm at ...> writes:

>>Yes - it's quite separate - you do not receive any licence to the original
>>data but you do get a licence to all copyright interest in the small bit of
>>map you received
> 
>As you have correctly pointed out with regard to the contributor
>terms, you aren't allowed to grant a license on someone else's
>copyright without permission.

Correct!  So it matters whether the tiles are produced by OSMF itself
or by a third party.

>So a license from, say, MapQuest,
>granting you permission to use the tiles under CC-BY-SA, only covers
>MapQuest's copyright, which only extends to the material contributed
>by MapQuest, not to the preexisting material already in the work.

...in which case, surely, we have the situation that in general, CC-BY-SA
map tiles cannot be made from the OSM data, although OSMF itself has the
power to do so because of the special rights granted by the contributor terms.

>>since you have not even looked at the original data you cannot
>>be infringing copyright in that (similar to 'clean room' rules)
>
>Depends to what extent map data is copyrightable.  If I write a score,
>and someone else records a piano rendition of the score, and a third
>person converts that recording back to a score, that score is still
>copyrighted by the original author.

Absolutely!  I am not disputing that at all.

I am saying that if you write a score, and then *with your permission and
authorization* somebody distributes a recording of it under CC-BY or
other permissive licence, then a person receiving it can exercise the
rights granted by the licence to turn it back into the original score.

>In any case, clean room rules don't apply to database rights.  So if
>you live in a jurisdiction with database rights, you can pretty much
>throw away that argument.

Yes, that is a separate argument.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> 







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