[OSM-legal-talk] Imagery CC-BY-NC 4.0 + OSM Specific allowance

[Tobias Wendorff]

Am Sa, 21.01.2017, 16:04 schrieb Simon Poole:
> I've pointed this our before. but anyway: we don't really care that much
> about the imagery licence as such as long as we are allowed to display
> it in the usual OSM tools. The real question are the rights in digitized
> vector data from that imagery.

We've got an equal problem with aerial imagery by "Regionalverband Ruhr"
in Germany. They're releasing their imagery under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Since I
was hired for a project, I discussed the licensing problem. They haven't
been aware of those licensing problems. They just want their images
(the files) to be protected by CC-BY-SA, but they allow (and want) OSM
to derive geodata from it.

But I also know the other side:
German NSOs, which released aerial imagery under OpenData gov license,
do not allow to derive data under another license without explicite
"BY" tag in any final product. This, of course, makes the license
incompatible to ODbL (which has been discussed quiet a lot).

The reason for this is the protection of the investment they've made.
Of course, they're ignoring that the citizens have made the investment,
but let's don't discuss this here.

> If they insist that the digitized data is a derivative and licensed on
> the same terms as the imagery itself*, we need either explicit
> permission roughly along the lines of the contributor terms (while
> theoretically permission to distribute on ODbL 1.0 terms is enough, that
> implies that the data may have to be removed on any licence change, a
> lot of work that we probably don't want to have looming over us), or we
> need waivers on specific incompatible terms of the licence. The later
> requires that we determine exactly what needs to waived, something that
> we (aka LWG) haven't done for CC BY-NC in any version.

Is it enough to get a permission to distribute it under ODbL? Wouldn't
it also be needed to have a permission for DbCL? The DbCL states that
the stored components don't have a foreign copyright. So contracts, which
tell us "you can distribute under ODbL only" wouldn't be valid for DbCl,
which is part of OpenStreetMap's use of ODbL (facts are free etc.).

Best regards,
Tobias