[OSM-legal-talk] MAPS.ME combining OSM data and non-OSM data?

[Simon Poole]

Am 08.07.2016 um 14:52 schrieb Andrew Harvey:
> According to [1] if someone combines non-horizontal layers together,
> the results must be shared under the ODBL.
No.

First a general remark:

A data consumer that is not complying with the ODbL always has two
options to comply with the licence:

- stop doing whatever is infringing the licence terms
- make the non-OSM data available as required by the licence.


>
> From my investigation it appears that the MAPS.ME app [2] is combining
> OSM hotels with non-OSM hotels.
>
> https://tianjara.net/hosted/maps.me-1.png is a screenshot from the
> app. Hotel A appears in the app,
> but as far as I can tell was never in OSM but rather one of the hotels
> they've added to their app from Booking.com. Hotel B is from OSM.
>
> This is the area https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/-33.87758/151.20447
>
> There are other examples of this too like this hotel
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/196622136 which in the app shows up
> next to their supplemented data like this
> https://tianjara.net/hosted/maps.me-2.png
>
> Am I correct that in order to be complaint with the license MAPS.ME
> either need to make this data available under the ODBL or remove all
> OSM hotels from their app?

Not being compatible with any of the guidelines is not the same as not
complying with the licence (as I just exhaustively explained wrt the
Collective Database guideline).

On to the case at hand:

It is obviously completely OK from an ODbL pov to create a collective
database from two sets of POIs, one from OSM, one from a 3rd party if
they have no further dependencies and interaction.

Both the Horizontal Layer and the Collective Database guidelines address
a specific de-duplication issue (in respect to the above use case): if
you take your proprietary dataset and  remove all POIs from the OSM
dataset that exist in your data, the OSM dataset remains, naturally,
ODbL licensed and your proprietary dataset remains proprietary (with
some information leak via the OSM data). If you do the de-duplication
the other way around you would be potentially be damaging the
proprietary status of your data so you wouldn't try that to start with.

You could now distribute the two datasets in a combined fashion and
argue that each of them is an individual database and as a result the
combined dataset is a Collective Database, both guidelines rule that out
(again that does not imply that a judge applying the ODbL to such a case
would come to the same conclusion).

In summary both guidelines in this use scenario boil down to prohibiting
de-duplication (of any kind).

Simon

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