[OSM-legal-talk] When should ODbL apply to geocoding

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/24/2015 10:17 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> and another with exactly these coordinates and their
>> OSM reverse geocoding result, and that you join them when displaying,
>> and make the OSM result database available under ODbL on request
> 
> Does he even have to? Isn't this covered by the trivial transformations rule? 

I think the trivial transformations rule would cover use cases where a
selection is made from OSM intrinsic properties ("everything with the
tag X"). This can easily be repeated by everyone.

I would hesitate to apply this rule for making a selection that can not
be repeated ("select reverse geocoding results for this non-public list
of coordinates and store them in my non-public derived database").

The case where the selection criteria are external to OSM, but publicly
available, is somewhere in between. I would always recommend erring on
the side of caution.

> In particular he doesn't add anything to OSM that isn't already in it, so there's nothing to share that would be useful to us.

Whether something is useful to us or not is not a factor in determining
where ODbL share-alike applies. This is not great - I'd love a license
that forces people to share stuff we're interested in and ignores
everything else. But it is hard to put that in lawyerese ;)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"