Sorry, this was supposed to also go to the imports list.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Serge Wroclawski <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 6:53 AM Subject: Re: [Imports] Marin County data license To: Nathan Mixter <[email protected]> Nathan, Unfortunately, as is often quite common, the folks you're talking to are telling you contradictory things. In such a case, we must take a conservative approach. So let me explain why it's contradictory. Public domain is a term of art. If something is public domain, you can place *no* restrictions on it. You can't say that there's a requirement for attribution. You can even take a public domain work and claim copyright ownership over it. The minute they say "Oh, here's a restriction", then they move from it being in the public domain to being "essentially in the public domain". This is how many people talk about Free/Open Source Software as well, but we know that in actual usage, we must abide by the license. As to this data in particular though, I see nothing on that page to indicate that it is available for our use. There is a disclaimer of warranty, but that is not reductive of their copyright terms, it's additive. In other words, in addition to copyright terms, we're also disclaiming warranty. As to your email response- I'd say that without more information from them, their language is contradictory and so the data isn't available for our use. Maybe you can get in contact with the right person and have them make a formal license for the data (such as CC0) and clear all this up? - Serge _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
