[OSM-legal-talk] Licenses for Produced Works under ODbL

[Robert Whittaker (OSM)]

On 22 October 2012 10:44, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> Produced Works do not have to be licensed under a share-alike licence.
> Attribution is required, as per the above clause. My view is that this
> implies a downstream attribution requirement too ("reasonably calculated to
> make any Person... exposed to the Produced Work") - besides, in practice,
> why wouldn't you want to? - but I think Robert disagrees with me on this.

I can certainly think of cases where you might want to release
produced works on a more liberal license -- for instance creating
public domain map tiles.

However, my interest in this is actually related to determining
whether potential source data under certain licenses can be
incorporated into an ODbL database. If the source license requires a
strict viral attribution, then I think the answer has to be no, since
the produced work attribution from ODbL need only point to the ODbL
database, not to the source data (even if the data from the particular
source dominates what's in the produced work). If the license requires
only some sort of attribution chain back to the source, then it may or
may not be ok, depending on whether attribution must be maintained in
derivatives of produced works.

As to whether ODbL requires attribution in derivatives of produced
works, I'm not entirely sure. Richard's interpretation above is
certainly not unreasonable. However, if the authors of the ODbL had
intended there to be viral attribution on produced works, I'm
surprised they didn't make it more explicit. I was also wanting to
check if there were any other relevant clauses I'd missed. So if
anyone else has any thoughts, please do jump in...

Thanks,

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker