[OSM-legal-talk] License Use Case

[Frederik Ramm]

Rob,

Rob Myers wrote:
> What do you mean by "private addreses"?
> Which clause(s) of the ODbL would require you to publish them?

Xavier is taking up a 2-week-old thread about a hypothetical application 
of his where users can upload photos and supply addresses where the 
photo has been taken, and the application would OSM to geocode the 
addresses and show "photos in the neighborhood". He's worried about 
having to disclose the addresses.

Xavier, a few random thoughts on how you might deal with your problem:

1. You don't have to release what you haven't got. So if the only thing 
required for your application to work is the *location* then just store 
the location and not the address. You can still dump the address to a 
log file on input, in case you need to follow things up manually later, 
but if the only thing in your database is the location then that's all 
you have to release.

2. I'm not sure if individual geocoding results really trigger any sort 
of license reaction as they are so trivial. Maybe the application could 
be structured in a way that would never even create/contain a 
substantial extract of OSM.

3. Assume your customers have uploaded 10.000 addresses and 10.000 
pictures. You could have one database with the columns "picture_id" and 
"address", containing what the users have uploaded, and another database 
with the columns "address", "lat", "lon" which contains the geocoding 
results for these 10.000 addresses. Now if you only mix these databases 
for display (i.e. you do a SELECT from the geocoding table to find all 
addresses in the vicinity, and JOIN that with the other table to find 
the photo IDs), then it is my opinion that you'd only have to release 
the geocoding db and not the photo db, as the photo table is not derived 
from OSM in any way. The geocoding table would allow users to see which 
places you have photos for (but you could add another 100.000 records to 
that table if you don't want people to know for sure). Maybe you 
wouldn't even store the address in plain text, but just a MD5 hash?

This is of course highly theoretical, as people are unlikely to even 
request that geocoding table from you.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"