[Osmf-talk] Regarding tile licensing

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 20 June 2019, Simon Poole wrote:
> The concept of layers of copyright works well when there are creative
> works that are clearly separate, I always like the easy to understand
> example of music where there might be separate authors and rights in
> the original composition, a orchestral score, a specific performance
> and so on. In our uses cases IMHO it tends to always be slightly
> murky.

Yes, though i would not really use the term "murky" but rather say
slightly less well established.  While in music the different roles in
the creative process and their separation have been established for
centuries in cartography the idea of separating the semantic geodata
from the design of the visual representation is a rather new one.

The specific thing about OSM-Carto tiles is that apart from the style
itself (which has a clear license), the ODbL geodata and a single data
file from Natural Earth (low zoom boundaries, public domain) there is
no real creative work in the tiles.  Therefore i kind of agree with
Peda that specifying specific license terms for the manifested
graphical representation in the tiles - as understandable it is to make
things simple for the tile users - is kind of strange and as discussed
potentially misleading regarding that it extents to the data and not
just applies to the graphical representation.

--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/