[OSM-talk] Missing Openaerial map from Potlatch

[Richard Fairhurst]

[cc:ed to legal-talk]

Andy Allan wrote:

> That's pretty clear cut - i-Cubed own copyright over the imagery, and
> haven't given anyone any rights to do stuff with them - unless they
> explicitly say otherwise. "Public Domain" isn't viral for derived
> works.

Probably the biggest thing I've learned about copyright since getting  
involved with OSM is how easy it is to overstate your rights as  
copyright holder. That's not really too surprising for those of us  
from the UK, which has a very maximalist attitude to geodata copyright  
(or at least the OS does, and it shouts loudest): if you come from the  
States you'll have a different take on these things.

I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce definitively on OAM, as  
I've not researched it particularly deeply. But I'd be reasonably  
certain that iCubed's colour correction in itself doesn't qualify as  
copyright-worthy for the purposes of tracing, so there's no issue in  
deriving from their flavour of Landsat. It's a bit like the NPE scans  
where I say "you can trace from these without restriction" - that's  
not me being nice (well, partly :) ), that's a recognition that the  
acts of scanning and rectification haven't created a new copyright  
over the geodata.

(The "severable improvement" stuff may be relevant here. Maybe.  
Someone who knows remotely wtf they're talking about will be able to  
do better than me.)

With the non-Landsat OAM images, the same argument can be had. Does  
rectification against Google create a new copyright? I can see an  
argument either way: a year ago I'd have said "yes it does", now I'm  
leaning a bit more towards "no it doesn't". But it really comes down  
to how cautious/paranoid you are, and OSM always takes the  
ultra-cautious route, which is why Steve's asked them to be removed  
for now.

(It's reasonably easily settled - either get Google to give the ok, or  
rerectify against OSM. Better still, rerectify against OSM's GPS  
traces alone, thereby sidestepping potential CC-BY-SA issues.)

Oh yeah, and then you have to think about contracts. Let's not even go there.


Side-issue: the discussion at WhereCamp about "are Google and  
Microsoft killing the ecosystem?" looks really interesting - maybe  
someone who was there could post or blog about it. But, you know, a  
really great way for them to nurture the ecosystem - which is  
ultimately in their interests - would be if they could give  
definitive, permissive answers to things like this. Is anyone asking?  
Should we? (Even better still, they could do a Yahoo with their aerial  
imagery - yeah, I know, oink oink flap flap.)

cheers
Richard