[talk-au] Statement from nearmap.com regarding submission of derived works from PhotoMaps to OpenStreetMap

[Andrew Harvey]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Elizabeth Dodd <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
> the last time I read the CTs (which have several versions), there was a
> clear reference to me having the rights to the data and perpetually
> licensing those rights to another organisation
> That would stop me signing up whether I used Yahoo! or Bing or NearMap.

It seems to be the view by a lot of OSMers that tracing Yahoo or Bing
is making a new work and that new work is not a derived work in the
copyright sense, but rather just a terms of service/contract issue.
Hence whomever does the tracing is free to license the work as they
please so long as in doing so they are in line with the terms of
service of that provider. Both the statements I've seen which OSMers
base tracing from these two, seem to make no mention of the copyright
of the imagery, and the copyright of derived works. Nearmap took a
different approach and made it a license thing rather than a terms and
conditions thing.

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Francis Davey <fjmd1a at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/6/15 Ben Last <ben.last at nearmap.com>
>> All such additions or edits submitted to OSM prior to 17 June 2011 may be
>> held and continue to be used by OSM under the terms in place between OSM and
>> the individual which submitted the addition or edit at the relevant time.
> I absolutely do not want to be a fly in the ointment here, but what this
> paragraph literally means is that OSM can do with those edits just those
> things which it was permitted to do by the individual contributor (and
> therefore under the terms to which that contributor agreed) prior to 17 June
> 2011. If that individual's agreement was restricted to a CC-BY-SA licence
> then OSM is unlikely to be able to then use the nearmap contributions under
> ODbL.
>
> Maybe that is what is understood in this thread, or maybe the context
> somehow says that this paragraph doesn't mean what it appears to mean, but I
> thought it was worth saying.

Yes. I think I follow-up to this point from nearmap is needed. I
agree, reading it this way nearmap is saying that if you clicked yes
to the CTs you can distribute your nearmap derived data under any
license you want so long as its in line with the CTs, but if you
didn't click the CTs you can only distribute as CC-BY-SA, this doesn't
sound like what they intended...

> That it was drafted, carefully, by a lawyer I do not doubt. But lawyers
> draft things on instruction to achieve particular goals. My understanding
> from Ben's comment is that one of the goals of nearmap is that derived works
> are distributed only under CC-BY-SA. The second paragraph does that job well
> as far as I can see and prevents OSM from relicensing nearmap data under
> ODbL.
>
> All this is, of course, on the assumption that any intellectual property
> rights require licensing.
>

Unless there is clear case law in this jurisdiction don't see how we
can assume otherwise, we must play on the safe side and assume there
is.