[OSM-legal-talk] Hampshire Rights of Way Data released under OSOpenData licence

[Andy Street]

On Thu, 2012-05-31 at 23:11 +0100, David Groom wrote:
> On talk-gb Nick Whiteleg recently announced what  initially seemed to be 
> some good news , that Hampshire County Council have released their Rights of 
> Way data under the OS OpenData licence.
> 
> However, my initial thoughts, and those of Robert Whittaker, was that this 
> might not seem as good news as at first appeared, because the OS OpenData is 
> not compatible with ODbL, and OSM had to seem explicit permission from OS 
> for the use of their data to be covered by OSM's  ODbL licence.  Since this 
> explicit agreement only covered the OS products, it seemed to be, and 
> Robert, that this could not be extended to the Hampshire County Council 
> (HCC)  Rights of Way (ROW) data.

As OSM's agreement is with the OS and not HCC I'd concur that strictly
speaking the HCC dataset is not compatible with the ODbl. I do wonder
though just how keen HCC would be to enforce attribution of a third
party, especially when that party had previously stated that it had no
objections to it's data being used in that way.

> I did have one further thought, which was that I could not see how HC ROW 
> data could be released under the OS OpenData (OSOD) licence, since the OSOD 
> licence is quite explicit in that in covers   "use of OS OpenData made 
> available at https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html 
> and at http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ ", and its difficult to see how 
> this could cover HCC data.

Yes, that thought had occurred to me too. 

> However I am now wondering if the statement on HCC web site [1] "The data 
> has been published as Open Data under the Ordnance Survey Open Data 
> Licence." is in fact a slightly badly worded statement.
> 
> A possible scenario which occurs to me is as follows:
> 
> HCC used OS Opendata to derive the HSS ROW data.  By this I mean that HCC 
> used the OS VectorMapDistrict rasters, over which they then drew the ROW 
> data which HCC had from their definitive statements.

Comparing the OpenData and non-OpenData versions of the definitive map
makes this seem highly unlikely. What I suspect happened is that the OS
agreed that HCC could licence their derivative work of a non-OpenData
product under the OS OpenData licence.

I guess what this boils down to is the question of whether our ODbL
compatibility agreement with the OS is for anything they release under
the OS OpenData licence (except Code-Point Open) or just for the stuff
that had released at the time the agreement was made. My reading of
Michael Collinson's post to the Talk-GB list[1] leads me to believe that
it is the former.

Cheers,

Andy

[1]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2011-July/011995.html