[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL Advice — POIs and private / personal data

Robin Hawkes rob.hawkes at gmail.com
Thu Feb 20 21:18:12 UTC 2020


Hello,

I'm hoping to get some help to better understand how the ODbL licence
applies with my use of OSM data. I understand that the discussion here is
not official — nor a replacement for proper legal advice — however I'm
hoping you can provide some guidance so I can come to my own conclusion as
to my obligations.

I'm working on an application for photographers to plan trips, discover new
locations and save "collections" of markers as inspiration for future
trips. The application is public (requiring registration and login) and
most of what users create within this application will be mostly private
and only view-able by themselves, though some may be shared with other
users of the application.

Here is a breakdown of relevant functionality:

   - The basemap for this is vector tiles from Mapbox (so OSM)
   - A user is able to use the basemap as visual reference and manually
   click on the map and place their own markers under a variety of types (eg.
   place I want to take a photo at, place I want to park my car, waterfall
   that I want to visit)
      - The coordinates for manually-placed markers will come from the
      mouse position, not from any OSM feature metadata underneath the mouse at
      the time
      - Manually-placed markers may have metadata added by the user to help
      them organise (eg. a title, an icon, etc) and will be persisted to a
      database
   - Separately, users will be able to search for OSM POIs near a location
   and add some of them manually to a personal "collection"
      - The POI search area will be on a relatively local basis (eg.
      smaller than a national park)
      - POI search will be limited to very specific features (parking,
      toilets, viewpoints, waterfalls, etc) — let's say somewhere
between 20 and
      40 feature types
      - POIs will either come from the vector tiles directly, or from a
      geocoding API (not yet decided)
      - A user can click on a POI and add it to a personal collection,
      which will persist the coordinates and POI name and type in a
database as a
      one-time, one-way operation (nothing else is stored in the database from
      OSM, not even the node ID) — the node coordinates are the only data of
      interest
      - A user can then view their saved POIs on the map (coordinates, name
      and type) and have the ability to change the position, name or
type if they
      wish due to personal preference (eg. I saved a viewpoint POI
from OSM but I
      later change it to a "place I want to take a photo" marker and
rename it to
      "Cool view of mountain")

I've not yet decided if I want to keep the user-created markers and the
'collected' OSM POI-sourced markers on separate map layers and separate
database tables, but it's possible if it helps reduce ODbL compliance
complexity.

Ultimately, each collection that a user creates will consist of relatively
few markers (<200 at the top end, probably more like <30 on average),
mostly manually added by the user (not from POIs), and will be private to
that user, unless they decide to make it view-able by other users of the
application. A user can create multiple collections of markers but
collections are isolated from each other and they can only view one
collection at a time on the map.

Regarding ODbL:

   - With the first example (manually clicking map to add markers); am I
   creating a derivative database, or a collective database? Or neither?
      - I've been reading up on the definitions and it's confusing
   - Likewise for the second example (storing coordinates manually chosen
   from a POI search and a user editing the title or position), would this be
   a derivative, collective or otherwise?
   - Should I be required to abide by the share-alike clause, would I need
   to also share any data added personally by the user while under the
   assumption that the collection was private and not accessible or visible by
   other users or the public?
      - eg. a marker title of "Place I want to camp the night", or a marker
      they add at their house with the title "My House"
      - This doesn't seem beneficial for OSM as they wouldn't be adding any
      useful information that isn't already in OSM (they're arguably making the
      data less useful by personalising it)
      - It could also expose confidential and identifiable information
      about the user if the collection is assumed to be private
      - It feels legally dubious to be obliged to hand over private data,
      especially if it can identity users
   - Are there any other ODbL provisions that might be relevant here?

I appreciate you taking the time to read through this respond, and please
ask me any questions required to help clarify things.

Regards,
Robin
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