[talk-au] nearmap LWG minutes

[Andrew Harvey]

I'm a bit late to the game but the one of the LWG minutes talks about nearmap...

>From part 4 of the LWG minutes
https://docs.google.com/View?id=dd9g3qjp_83gvxm3xgd&pli=1
>- Automated deriving....
>
>Nearmap believe that their copyright exists in works derived from their imagery, so this would include the OSM database.  Granting derived works wider than CC-BY-SA/ODbL issue, rights be passed to others, under non-restrict terms. OSM offerering a broad license weakens this claim and is damaging to their business model. As a publicly listed company, they need to think very careful about this.
>They feel that in the near future, a major value of imagery would be the ability to automatically derive features from it.
>LWG pointed out that it is possible for the provider to restrict how imagery was used, for example to human-driven tracing only using only a limited set of approved apps, and that there was a precedent with Yahoo already in place.  This might be attractive to NearMap as it totally nder their control.

The free/community license from nearmap lets me run some automated
feature extraction to create vector data and allows me to own that
copyright and release it under a CC-BY-SA license to everyone without
any additional license terms. I am then free to distribute that
derived vector data to a government agency regardless of whether that
agency already has an agreement with nearmap. Hence a goverment agency
that doesn't want to pay nearmap but just wants to run their automated
feature extraction could just take this path, the good thing then is
that if that data ever gets published its CC-BY-SA.

Hopefully nearmap won't try to close this feature off. We wouldn't
want them, for instance, limiting deriving data to human-tracing only
(something that you can't prove anyway), as automated feature
extraction is a potentially helpful tool for OSM contributors. Nor
would I want to see them limiting CC-BY-SA derived works to those only
uploaded to OSM (just like Microsoft is doing).

>- Limited term ...
>
>It was also suggested that if a future license change was made that was undesirable to NearMap they could terminate the right to derive new >data but allow past derivations to remain. Ben responded that this had been actively considered within NearMap but had been felt to be too risky.
>
>In the post meeting summation, Mike pointed out that the key thing to consider is that "vertical IP", i.e. maintaining rights up a chain imagery -> derived vector data -> map making, was very important to NearMap's business model but not necessarily good for OpenStreetMap's objectives.