[OSM-talk] open data

[Richard Fairhurst]

Quoting rob at robmyers.org:

> Hi.
>
> My name's Rob Myers. I'm involved with various Free Culture projects  
>  including Free Culture UK, I'm a Creative Commons mailing list  
> regular,
> and I helped map Reading a little the other weekend.

Welcome :)

I'll apologise in advance if this turns out as a bit of a fisking.  
We've gone through a lot of licence ground on the list in the past n  
months. We don't yet agree, but we do have some awareness of the  
particular issues relating to OSM. Some of this message is restating  
these, so please bear with me.

> [...] And the existing BY-SA licence doesn't  prevent any of the  
> uses people have in mind. You can still print
> beautiful maps based on the data or mash it up with flickr images. What
> BY-SA does is stop people from making those uses exclusive. But if you
> are selling high-quality maps, a grubby photocopy of your work is no
> competition whether it has a BY-SA logo on it or not.

Sure, a grubby photocopy isn't, but a high-quality scan/photo is  
competition (Bridgeman vs Corel). So's a copy-and-pastable webmap.

I've had maps I've drawn stolen by web developers with no credit, let  
alone payment, in the past... it ain't fun.

> The attribution-only/BY licence won't work for "naming and shaming".  
>  Microsoft happily igored complaints over their use of BSD code (which
> uses an equivalent licence) in Windows, and didn't pay any money to the
> BSD project.

I presume you're talking about TCP/IP. AIUI Microsoft (for whom I'm  
certainly no apologist) distributed compiled code, not source, without  
attribution, which is entirely permitted by BSD-Attribution.

That needn't be true of CC-BY or Our Own Attribution Licence,  
especially if ours requires a prominent hyperlink (in  
hyperlink-capable media (: ). I actually don't think anyone is  
advocating pure BSD or BSD-Attribution here.

> [...]
> Tailoring licences to a particular kind of work is a concept that comes up
> regularly on the CC mailing lists. Certainly each kind of work has its
> differences. But locking a particular kind of work to a particular licence
> ghettoises it. An OSM licence that covered only geodata would   
> prevent mash-ups and other creative uses of OSM data, and like an  
> attribution-only licence would prevent those uses giving anything back
> to OSM.

Not at all - it wouldn't prevent mashups. Just because you write a  
licence relating to (geo-)data doesn't mean that you can only  
distribute as (geo-)data, IYSWIM.

To the contrary, it would _encourage_ them by stating explicitly how  
mashups are permissible. On this list, where people are more aware of  
geodata licensing issues than most other places on the web, there are  
about 50 different interpretations of how CC-SA applies to geodata. If  
we can't agree, what chance your average masher upper?

CC is for Creative. Geodata ain't creative, it's a faithful  
representation of facts on the ground. Some on the list (like Emil)  
don't think that facts can be copyrighted anyway. But whatever your  
interpretation, there are certainly questions as to how well a  
creative works licence applies to data.

(This debate was kind of started by Steve's superb EuroOSCon talk,  
http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=86 , which is really worth listening  
to/reading.)

> Creative uses of OSM data that return value (data, maps, code, whatever)
> to OSM as a virtue of the licence are much better than naming-and-shaming

True if we (OSMF) _want_ this to be returned to OSM. But Andy cited  
the aims of the foundation earlier, and they relate specifically and  
solely to "geospatial data". If OSM wants to gather maps, code and  
whatever, then that's a different debate and not one on which we (yet)  
have a consensus.

> [...]
> A geodata-only licence will prevent me making art. A
> licence that restricts my uses of derivatives (such as preventing me
> re-extracting points) will limit the art I can make.

Again, that's really not true. I blathered on about such a licence at
http://www.systemed.net/blog/entry060613093350.html

which might be relevant.

> [...]
> OSM need solid legal advice from a Real Lawyer(tm) on the copyrightability of
> GSM log data and maps made from that data.

ITYM GPS, but otherwise, yes, agree 100%.

cheers
Richard