[Talk-us] press from SOTM US
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sat Oct 20 17:38:22 GMT 2012
Hi,
On 10/20/2012 09:59 AM, Toby Murray wrote:
> The discussion was about the fact that some companies are very afraid
> of share-alike licenses and it is preventing them from using our data
> to its fullest potential.
There are several sides to this.
Of course the share-alike license prevents companies from using our data
to the same potential as a hypothetical PD counterpart (or a
licensed-for-money competitor); excluding some kinds of
use-without-sharing-back is the reason for a share-alike license and was
desired by a large majority of the stakeholders.
On the other hand, the license does not have to be feared, and some
users might actually let their fear of share-alike shy away from some
totally legal uses of OSM.
> There is some uncertainty about when exactly
> the share-alike clause is activated. One specific example that was
> mentioned: If you use OSM data to geocode a user's address, does the
> user database then have to be shared?
No, but the database of locations, which might let others guess who your
users are.
> That's apparently how the
> lawyers tend to read it but in my mind this would be silly. We have no
> use for a company's user database even if it were possible to release
> it without breaking every privacy law on the books.
I agree that we have little use for that database of locations but I
think that it is crystal clear this is a "derived" database. The only
way to not require share-alike for that would be - as Richard has
recently mentioned on legal-talk, where this discussion should be held
-, to define any amount of geocoded locations to be "insubstantial".
However that would raise the question - could you not, by mass-geocoding
every single address on every single street - re-create our whole street
network? That could hardly be insubstantial then.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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