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

[David Groom]

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.

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.

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.

By doing this HCC were bound by the terms of the OSOD licence.

When HCC state "The data has been published as Open Data under the Ordnance 
Survey Open Data Licence"  I wonder what they actually mean is something 
along the lines of  "The data has been published as Open Data with the 
additional provisions required under the Ordnance Survey Open Data Licence".

If this scenario is correct, then it would seem to me that the data is OK to 
use in OSM. But it would need clarification from HCC that this is what they 
meant.

David


[1] 
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/communications/mediacentre/mediareleases.htm?newsid=534104