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

[Rob Myers]

On 11/18/2010 08:46 PM, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>>
>> 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

It disclaims the DB right in all the 3.0 versions iirc.

Which is a good point [adds it to the list of things to ask about].

> 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

You're told of the existence of the source database in the attribution 
for the CC work.

If the CC work includes fair use material, trademarks, description of 
patents, or photographs of models without release sheets then the CC 
licence doesn't cover those either despite their inclusion.

> 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.

"Reverse engineer" is a euphemism for "recreate". ;-)

Since the data isn't covered by BY-SA, if I recreate the data it isn't 
covered by BY-SA.

(See Jordan's "secret sauce" explanation on odc-discuss.)

> 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.

Steganography doesn't defeat copyright.

>> 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.

http://www.poster.net/star-wars/star-wars-episode-ii-yoda-photomosaic-4900333.jpg

The above image could be made of BY or BY-SA images and the resulting 
image would still infringe on the copyright in the movie and the 
character it depicts.

> 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?

You don't. But if you're using them to create an image of Yoda, it 
doesn't matter what images you use.

- Rob.