[talk-au] ODBL and real life...

Grant Slater openstreetmap at firefishy.com
Sun Jun 19 18:12:25 BST 2011


On 19 June 2011 16:00, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 June 2011 00:55, Grant Slater <openstreetmap at firefishy.com> wrote:
>> If however on the other hand if someone created an SVG file specially
>> for the purpose of extracted OSM data and tags, it would be extremely
>> difficult for them to argue that is a produced work and not a
>> database.
>
> That's assuming a single party acting on bad faith, 2 independent
> parties operating independently would be able to claim otherwise.
>
>> There is a simple guideline on the wiki: (from 2009)
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Produced_Work_-_Guideline
>>
>>> In other words CC-by-SA protects data better than ODBL.
>>>
>>
>> No. See above.
>
> You are assuming that a single party or both parties involved are
> operating under bad faith, in all likelihood there could be a range of
> places to source data from, even OSM.org for that matter, with a
> secondary party operating in the US.
>

I am sure theortical (and legally risky) loopholes could be found for
example as you describe above. We could have contructed painfully
restrictive terms to be placed on the produced works, but is there
really a realistic threat? End of the day we are an open project who
distribute open data under extremely liberal terms. The barrier to
successfully reverse engineering produced works is high, while
downloading ALL our data from http://planet.osm.org is extremely low.

We have people subverting our CC-BY-SA license right now!!1! *zomg*
And they wouldn't be abusing our ODbL license in future.
Case: UN: http://www.unitar.org/unosat-releases-new-maps-over-haiti

/ Grant



More information about the Talk-au mailing list