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

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 18 November 2010 17:30, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
> On 11/18/2010 02:58 PM, Ed Avis wrote:
>>
>> 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.

When I'm given a set of tiles under a CC license (which disclaims the
database rights in some versions), I think I can justifiably assume
that it doesn't contain anyone else's work under conditions different
from those in the license I was given, unless I'm told so.  So I
should be able to excercise my right to reverse engineer the POIs
names and positions and the streets graph represented by the bitmaps
and distribute the result under a license compatible with the CC
license.

So it should be entirely possible to reproduce most of planet.osm or
at least the useful part of it (so e.g. not the object IDs and not
their order) which would not be covered by database rights or
copyright of OSMF.  For example I could produce z30 tiles with a
public domain mapnik stylesheet and my friend could run a program to
produce a .osm file taking the tileset and the stylesheet as input.

>
> 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.

Is there any known case that would show that this is how copyright
works?  I'm no lawyer, but copyright is mostly "reasonable" to me
whereas what you explain would make it unreasonable.

For example say I'm using the CC-BY-SA photographs from flickr to
create a great photo wall, placing the pictures in alphabetical order.
 How do I know that I'm not recreating a differently licensed work by
somebody else, from which all the pictures were cut out?

Cheers