Hi, On 06/18/2012 05:59 AM, Kate Chapman wrote:
I have a question about what would trigger the ShareAlike in the context of government. Let's say for example a National Mapping Agency takes the OpenStreetMap road data for their area and then improves upon it. Those improvements are shared with the Ministry of the Environment. Is that redistribution?
First of all, any share-alike - with CC-By-SA as well as ODbL - only affects those who are in receipt of the derived work.
So if the NMA gives a derived work to the ME, then *even if* that is considered distribution, the rights arising from share-alike are only granted to the ME, and not to the general public.
(Same if you sell OSM derived databases, under old or new license - the customer gains share-alike rights but not a non-customer.)
The interesting question is, and I don't know if Paul intended to hint at that with his FOI reference: What happens if the information is leaked, e.g. if the ME has to reveal the derived data as a result of a FOI request - does the recipient (who made the FOI request) then gain share-alike rights also? I presume they do but I'm not sure. Other kinds of "leaks" are possible; among UK government officials it is customary to lose notebooks and hard disks on trains. The GPL FAQ (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#TOCInternalDistribution) contains the question whether theft of previously un-relesed GPL software would trigger share-alike and the answer is no, because the sharing did not happen intentionally.
The GPL FAQ also says that company-internal use is not distribution, but providing copies to off-site contractors is; if that were true for OSM, then if you made a PDF and emailed that to a print shop to make 20 copies for you that would already be distribution.
(What happens of the MoD takes an OSM map, draws a little bit on top of it and stamps it "secret" - is that allowed at all, given that the current license requires that they must not add any restrictions to the material...?)
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
