Sadly, I think some of us know more about data licensing than a lot of
government attorneys. I also got a "yeah, we consider it public domain"
email from the Kansas Department of Transportation regarding the
county/city maps they have on their website. I think in some situations
that's as good as we are going to get.

Toby


On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 10:29 PM, Paul Norman <[email protected]> wrote:

> Going from the general issues with PD back to the specific case here, I’d
> suggest that they provide a statement that the data is public domain and
> has no restrictions placed on it. When a government goes on record as
> saying that a particular dataset is public domain, we generally have taken
> them at their word, as they’re the ones best positioned to understand their
> specific legal situation. For an individual, I’d be more reluctant and want
> something like CC0, or for jurisdictions with database rights, PDDL.
>
>
>
> As Richard commented, we really need to see some sample data to spot
> problems. Could you upload a sample .osm file somewhere (web host, dropbox,
> etc)?
>
>
>
> *From:* Serge Wroclawski [mailto:[email protected]]
> *Sent:* Sunday, December 01, 2013 3:47 PM
> *To:* Randal Hale
> *Cc:* Imports US
> *Subject:* Re: [Imports-us] Union County Georgia Building Footprints
>
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Randal Hale <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> If we are drinking beer there is no way I'm talking about licensing of
> data.
>
>
>
> So help me out here - I'm looking at Creative commons and I see 6 licenses
> - I assume you are talking about CC-By. Originally OSM was CCbySA correct?
>
>
>
> I'm talking about CC0: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_use_for_data
>
> As Jason points out, you can use a public domain declaration instead,
> since there aren't jurisdiction issues to worry about.
>
> > I think it would help if someone had a list of licenses up that blend
> well with ODBL - in my line of work security
> > is the big thing (i.e. don't let anyone else see this) - licensing not
> so much.
>
> This is a non-trivial task that requires lawyers to be definitive. The
> Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation both put in effort
> in this area for software, and I can tell you that it's a ton of work. The
> problem is that government agencies typically don't just want to use a
> standard license (such as CC0), they want to make their own, or they will
> say things "This work is in the public domain, but you must attribute us."-
> which is legally impossible, since Public Domain has no restrictions
> whatsoever- so once you add any restrictions, it's no longer public domain.
>
> The solution to this is to use a very liberal, standard license like CC0.
>
> > If they licensed this ODBL and I stuck into OSM would that be like
> dividing by 0?
>
>
>
> The issue of license compatibility from external data sources is tricky.
> For example, for data that was under CC-BY-SA (the previous OSM license),
> some of it had to be removed from OSM because when OSM moved to ODbL, the
> CC-BY-SA data couldn't go along with it. The current license we use is OdBL
> 1.0, but it is conceivable that in 10 years, a new license would be better.
> The Contributor Terms say that when you contribute to OSM, you are saying
> that you have ownership of the data, or at least have the rights to use the
> data in OSM, but if the data has a very specific license which cannot be
> modified, then problems can arise.
>
> If you have questions about these issues, the right place for them is the
> License Working Group, which has access to attorneys.
>
> - Serge
>
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> [email protected]
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us
>
>
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