[OSM-legal-talk] Garmin Maps / Produced Works

[80n]

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> wrote:

> If you
> render as a PNG, without additional metadata you are similarly going to
> have difficulty reverse engineering it (admittedly more difficulty than
> with vector graphics, which much more closely resemble the geodata).
> The fact that you actually have to reverse engineer either to get useful
> geodata out of them suggests they are Produced Works alone.
>

Ironically, for most people it is much easier to reverse engineer a .png
than it would be to inport a dataset.

Given a dataset in an arbitrary format then it will require a significant
effort to analyse and extract data in a form that is useful to OSM.
Conversely, it is almost trivial to trace from an image.

It is an oft quoted aspect of the ODbL approach that it's the data that OSM
is interested in.  However, in practice it would seem to me that it is going
to be really difficult to reincorporate data that has been combined with an
ODbL database.  Firstly, the publisher can distribute it in any arbitrary
format, removing IDs, modifying tags, etc.  There is no incentive for the
publisher to make it easy to use.

Secondly, the size of the database is likely to be formidable limiting the
number of people who might have the resources to deal with it.  OSMF could
help here by providing hardware resources to anyone who wanted to perform an
import, but that's a terrible burden on a project that has better things to
do with it's hardware.

Thirdly, the publisher can simply refuse to agree to the contributor terms.

Finally, the possiblility of tracing the content from a published .png may
also be denied as produced works can be published under very restrictive
and/or incompatible licenses.

I find it hard to imagine that *any* ODbL licensed data will ever get shared
back to OSM.  If it is so difficult to share back data then I think that
will be a serious demotivator for many contributors.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/attachments/20100904/41b2bde9/attachment.html>