[OSM-legal-talk] Infringements - examples, analysis and request for removal

[hbogner]

On 03/31/2012 01:25 PM, Darko Sokolić wrote:
>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I contributed to OpenStreetMap under CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. It was great
> pleasure, and I enjoyed it very much.
> I did not accept new Contributor Terms and new license.
> Also, I did not authorise anyone, in any way, to relicense or sublicense
> my contributions.
>
> I expect that my contributions will be deleted as part of moving to new
> licence.
> To my surprise, I see that most of my original contributions are already
> deleted and replaced with no noticeable difference.
> Looking at the details I saw that just the user attribute has changed
> (often Janjko and SilverSpace), timestamp is diferent, coordinates are
> slightly offset, ID is of course different, and there is no history data.
> Replacement data is therefore in CC-BY-SA terminology Derivative Work
> based on my original Work.
>
> This clearly infringes CC-BY-SA in at least two ways:
> * by erasing history and replacing author name this violates attribution
> requirement,
> * by submitting such Dertivative Work under new Contributor Terms
> attempt is made to license Derivative work under ODbl and DbCL.
>
> This infringing data must be removed.
> Alternatively, while OSM is still served to public as CC-BY-SA, this
> infringing data might be reverted to original data.
>
> Though I like revering data better, I cannot do it. Revertion scripts,
> in my understaning, run on same API for submitting new/edited data. So,
> if to run and of these, I need an active account, an account that
> accepted new Contributor Terms. By doing so, all data (re)created
> through revert scripts will be licensed under ODbl/DbCL. So, I cannot do
> it this way.
>
> I could do removal of infringing data, but this might appear like
> massive vandalism.
>
> Can OSMF revert infiringing changesets, or remove infringing data? This
> is maybe the best way, and also it will probably use server resurces in
> most efficient way. I also believe that OSMF has already tools to find
> similarities in present and historic (deleted) data.
>
> I am not aware of such tools, so I did some analysis myself, developing
> needed tools. Scope of analysis is limited to contributions of three
> users (myself, and two mentioned above, that I noticed by looking at
> live map tiles).
>
> I this analysis I've covered 7329 nodes.
> I was looking for situations where any of these nodes is deleted by
> another user, and then new node is created on similar location in the
> same changeset. Then I grouped results by positional error, that is
> distance between new and old node.
>
> This is what I found (grouped by author of replacement nodes):
> for positional error of up to cca 11 m in latitude and 7,8 m in
> longitude (that is 4 decimal digits in LAT/LON in OSM database):
> SilverSpace | 4565 nodes (62% of all analysed nodes)
> Janjko | 1363 nodes (19%)
> for positional error of up to cca 1,1 m in latitude to 0,78 m in longitude:
> SilverSpace | 2909 (40%)
> Janjko | 758 (10%)
>
> For first group we might argue that cca 10 meters is large distance and
> that any usual remapping would fit in (but visual comparison of rendered
> data reveals similarities).
> In the second group, where positional error is up to cca 1 m - it is
> very hard to defend this as not infringement.
>
> I started to analyse not only maximum deviations, but averages, and
> standard deviations, and also I looked into minimal positional errors.
> And the I found that significant number of replacement nodes are placed
> on the _very_same_position_ of original node (again - in the same
> changeset):
> SilverSpace | 2235 (30%!)
> Janjko | 260 (3,5%)
> We are talking here about precision of lat/lon in 7 decimal places. This
> is precision of about 11 mm in latitude and 7,8 mm in longitude. In 34%
> of sampled data. This is not a coincidence. This is intentional
> infringement.
>
> If anybody else suspects that his/here data is infringed in similar
> fashion, I am willing to share my tools and experience that I've gained
> during this analysis.
> I also indend to refine tools to cover more similaritites. So far I
> dealt only with nodes, their position, and with changesets in which
> nodes were created and deleted.
>
> DarkoS

I know you didn't contact local Croatia community, but did you contact 
those users?
It would be nice of you if you could send us/me a file with all your 
contributions so we can delete them from OSM(if they are the same) and 
solve this conflict that way.

Regards,
Hrvoje Bogner