[OSM-talk] Why do you use Google Maps instead of OSM? Because of buildings...

[Peter Miller]

On 11 Nov 2009, at 14:58, Anthony wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com 
> > wrote:
>> My reading of this is
>> that CloudMade are claiming (c) over the rendered images which would
>> make it illegal to copy them without permission. Such a restriction  
>> is
>> of course incompatible with the CC-BY-SA OSM data licence
>
> No it isn't.  You have to copyright a work in order to release it
> under the CC-BY-SA license.

Sure, but they are not stating that they are releasing their  
copyrighted rendering as CC-BY-SA so I don't know if I can recommend  
that people use it.

To be clear, the ODbL license, when it arrives, will allow people to  
create renderings that are (c) and are which are not then released  
CCBYSA which I think will be good for the project because people will  
be able to commercially exploit clever rendering and analysis of OSM  
data to create beautiful things - including artistic maps based on OSM  
data. Currently the artist would probably need to release their work  
as CCBYSA. Using ODbL people will also be able to public domain  
renderings. All of this creates a ot of new incentives to use OSM data  
for different purposes.

The big rule in ODbL is that the core database (as distinct from  
rendering) must be released under an open data license and also any  
derived database from the osm database must be released under ODbL  
which therefore allows anyone else to produce beautiful renderings in  
competition with these people so we have a nice level of competition  
working.

Indeed, it is important to our company (ITO World) that we can produce  
sophisticated images and analysis by combining OSM data with other  
separate databases and create a work that we can then protect and sell  
- without that right to earn income from our analysis and rendering  
then we would be much less interested in OSM.

I suspect that the same may be true for CM in that they have spent a  
lot of money building up a rendering system, have created excellent  
rendering rules and built a style editor and now need to earn some  
money from it somehow - allowing anyone to harvest their tiles for any  
purpose for free including being able to host tiles scraped from CM on  
a competing (free?) service would probably be really bad news for them.

As such I think they have probably written their attribution to suit  
the upcoming license rather than the current one, but without  
clarification I would not suggest that people should scrape their map  
times for use on other services.



Regards,



Peter Miller





Regards,


Peter