[OSM-talk] OSM layer into Adobe Illustrator?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> Having fewer open licenses in the world is a good thing, not a bad
> one. We don't necessarily need a whole family of CC license for maps,
> another whole family for journals, yet another for blogs or wikis,
> etc. We need people looking and saying "Ah, that's CC-BY-SA? I can
> translate it to Pashto and use it on my blog then", or in a business
> situation: "Ah, here it says CC-BY-SA-2.5 or later. Let me check the
> document the legal department had written had about these. Ah, they
> say CC-BY-3.0 and earlier are OK and I should list the name of the
> copyright holder in the credits if he has mentioned it and then
> forward all the info to the department to check its legality, but I
> should contact the legal department for any other CC license before
> even thinking about using it."

Mmm, kind of. Sure, there's no point in licence proliferation for the  
sake of it. But on the other hand, that shouldn't force us into using  
blatantly unsuitable licences[1] just because nothing else exists.

To take your second quote (the business situation), even though we've  
chosen[2] CC-BY-SA 2.0, no sensible lawyer would clear use of our data  
just because they've previously ok'd use of, say, Wikitravel content  
(which is also CC-BY-SA). Firstly, Wikitravel makes it easier to  
fulfil the Attribution requirement: look at the footer of each of  
their pages. We don't do that. Secondly, maps (or geodata) and  
creative works are treated differently in most jurisdictions. This  
will very strongly impact on the applicability of the CC licence,  
which can only work within the enclosing legislation.

As SteveC observed at a talk a while back, open _data_ is pretty much  
a new category. There are very, very few licences that address its  
particular issues in any way - and of those that do exist, none that  
(AFAIK) have gained any widespread traction.

Of course, the elephant in the room, which most of us are blissfully  
ignoring, is whether _any_ licences are valid for geodata in some of  
the principal jurisdictions in which we operate. The more case law I  
read, the more I'm coming to see what people mean by "facts can't be  
copyrighted".

cheers
Richard

[1] that's rhetoric, I'm making no claim here as to whether CC-BY-SA is
     blatantly unsuitable or not ;)
[2] for some values of "chosen"