[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL and publishing source data

80n 80n80n at gmail.com
Sun Nov 27 22:47:20 GMT 2011


On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:

> Right, so I guess what Kai Kruger wrote "you only have to share the last
> in a
> chain of derived databases that leads to a produced work, right?" is not
> so?
>
>
As far as I can see there is no requirement to "show your workings" as long
as you make the Derived Database available under ODbL.

Suppose you transform the OSM database, adding in some non-OSM-content
along the way and produce a table containing three columns: x, y and
colour, where x and y are pixel coordinates for an image and the colour
column specifies the colour value for the pixel.

The result is that you can publish a table and an image that contain
identical information.  The table has to be licensed as ODbL and the image,
being a Produced Work, can be published under any license whatsoever.

So far so good.

Assuming the Produced Work was not published under a friendly license it
can't be used so we can forget about that.

The Derived Database can, however, be transformed into the same (or a
similar) image which can be reincorporated.  How?  By making your own
Produced Work you can license it under an OSM friendly license[1].  You
would, of course, need to hand trace from it to recover the non-OSM-content
but that's easy to do and there's a large army of OSMers who are very
skilled at this task, so that's not a problem.

For any Derived Database it will always be possible to recover the content
by making a liberally licensed Produced Work from it and tracing.

80n

[1] You have to do this step because any unfriendly publisher would block
the use of the ODbL content directly by simply refusing to agree to the
Contributor Terms.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/attachments/20111127/46802657/attachment.html>


More information about the legal-talk mailing list