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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

deliberately Offlist


2012/10/30 Michael Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz>:
> No loop hole. Unless I am missing something earlier in the thread, this is
> covering very old ground.  This is the LWG understanding:  The buzz phrase
> is "layered copyright".  Using an open licensed photo of a MacDonald's
> restaurant does not give one the right to use MacDonald's logo. In our
> world, the classic case is the SVG file. The publisher can publish it as a
> Produced Work if the intent is to show a pretty picture but if someone then
> comes along and tries to extract and re-constitute OSM data from it, then
> OSM copyright applies to them.


deliberately Offlist

Mike, thank you for this statement

I am glad to read this and I really hope it is like this. The
intentions should be associated to the use and not to the producer of
the work (i.e. like you wrote above and not like I read it here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Produced_Work_-_Guideline
). Someone could produce a SVG with the intent to show a pretty
picture (i.e. not intended for the extraction of data and thus clearly
a produced work), but who then comes along and uses it with different
intentions (data extraction) must not do it, because in this case the
same work turned automagically into a database. (That's why it is
important that every produced work has strings attached, (c) for the
data OSM contributors, ODbL1.0, which fortunately is part of the
current guidelines)

Part of my worries rise from the fact, that it seems there once was an
anti-reengineering clause in the ODbL which was then removed to obtain
compatibility with cc-by-sa and other share-alike licenses. Isn't this
an indication that re-engineering is allowed? I mean, why else would
it have been removed? (argueing from an offenders point of view).

cheers,
Martin