[OSM-legal-talk] [talk-au] Statement from nearmap.com regarding submission of derived works from PhotoMaps to OpenStreetMap

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 12:07 AM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 June 2011 01:46, Eugene Alvin Villar <seav80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Let me try copyright-only examples.
>>
>> I can take up the full text of all of the works of William
>> Shakespeare, compile it into a book with annotations, and release the
>> book under CC-BY-SA. Now since the original text by Shakespeare is
>> already in the public domain, I can copy those parts from the book
>> without following the book's CC license. In this case, the CC license
>> has no way to restrict me from doing that.
>>
>> Here's another example. All English Wikipedia articles are licensed
>> CC-BY-SA. Most articles have images. Some images are *not* licensed
>> CC-BY-SA. In fact, many of such images are included in the article
>> under fair use reasoning. That doesn't give the reader the license to
>> use such images under CC-BY-SA simply because they were included in
>> CC-BY-SA-licensed articles.
>
> The problem here isn't cc-by-sa, it's bigger picture stuff, from what
> I understand/have been led to believe, the ODBL doesn't limit what
> license produced works can be published under, outside of the EU there
> is limited or no database rights, so if tiles are produced and
> published under PD/CC0/CC-by/CC-by-SA there is no limitation on
> deriving, selling etc etc those tiles, other than what those copyright
> licenses limit you to do, obviously deriving cc-by-sa tiles would need
> to be under a cc-by-sa license etc.
>
> I don't wish to complicate this issue, but I'm led to believe that a
> lot of database rights are yet to have precedents, I think this would
> be pointless conjecture at this time.
>
> Frederik and others were trying to claim there was some kind of
> implied limit on derivatives, even in non-EU countries, which comes
> back to my original question about minimum license, or websites
> needing to have a binding contract on the end user to limit or prevent
> turning information on tiles back into some kind of vector data set.
>
> Then you have a whole other argument over what constitutes a produced
> work and so on.

I don't think you're going to get clear answers about these specific
cases. It will take a court decision to provide precedent rulings on
such things.

And this is not a problem specific to ODbL. Even CC licenses have
unresolved problems, like a question I thought of regarding how a
person in country A will be able to use a work released under a CC
license that was ported to country B. Should the person in country A
follow provisions in CC-license-ported-to-B even if that doesn't apply
to his jurisdiction? Can he use the work in CC-license-ported-to-A? Or
can he revert to the unported CC license?