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

Michael Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Tue Oct 30 13:47:12 GMT 2012


On 30/10/2012 13:07, Jonathan Harley wrote:
>
> (After a hiatus - I've been discussing this off-list with Anthony and 
> others.)
>
[snip]
>
> One thing that's confusing me, is that 
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright does not say what license 
> applies to the contents. ODbL specifically says that it only applies 
> to the database and a separate license is required for the contents. 
> It suggests that a notice should be inserted "prominently in all 
> relevant locations" which surely includes the copyright wiki page.
>
> I remember earlier discussions on this list about using ODcL for the 
> contents. Was this what was agreed on? LWG, anyone?

Hi Jonathan,

The short answer is the the contributor terms control content and that 
the relevant wording there is heavily modelled on ODcL. As a low 
priority TODO, I'll trace back the exact mechanism to see if we can be 
more obvious about the relationships on the copyright page without using 
tortuous language. It has been a while.

ODbL can basically be used in two ways; a (or even multiple) contents 
license more restrictive than the ODbL itself or less restrictive.  The 
first case can be useful if distributing a collection of things, 
content, that are useful discretely, for example photos or scientific 
papers.  In that case, the database can be downloaded freely, sent 
around to others and used in-house, but each photo might have a 
commercial fee-paying license if it was then extracted and published in 
a magazine.  We used the second case as we wanted a "one stop shop" 
whereby end users only have to consider one license and not compare and 
contrast.  The CTs, for example, give end users no extra rights and no 
extra freedoms.

Mike



More information about the legal-talk mailing list