Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Simon Poole

I personally can't see enough wiggle room both in the ODbL and the CTs
to make any dataset generated by geocoding and/or reverse geocoding
anything else than a derivative database. It is just the ODbL working as
intended. We went through a lot of effort to get from a broken to a
functional licence that is appropriate for the subject matter and we
shouldn't be unhappy with the fact that our licence now works (even
though I like many others, would have preferred a more liberal licence).

We don't have any exact information on the position of the community,
but I would suspect that we have substantial support for strong share a
like provisions and that getting a 2/3 majority for relaxed terms would
be big challenge (I would like to remind everybody that we lost a number
of quite large mappers during the licence change process due to the ODbL
being a sell out to commercial interests and not SA enough).

The only way out that I could see to avoid infection of propriety
information is, along the lines of the suggestion by the LWG, to only
geocode address information and use the address information as a key to
look up such propriety information on the fly, the address DB itself
being subject to ODbL terms. This however wouldn't help in the reverse
geocoding use case (example: user clicks on a map to locate a bar and we
return an address, the dataset of such addresses and any associated
information would probably always be tainted).

Simon


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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Alex Barth

I'd hate to see us give up here, there is too much at stake. The open questions 
around geocoding are doing OSM a disservice just as CC-BY-SA did. This is from 
a commercial community member's perspective just as an individual's, assuming 
we all want a better open map. Opening OSM to geocoding would be one of the 
main drivers for getting better boundary data and better addresses. Depending 
on your read of the license, right now OSM's terms on geocoding are potentially 
stricter than Google's or Navteq's.

I'd love to work with whoever is interested on wording a clarification 
statement and figuring out the process on how to decide on it.

On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:36 AM, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:

 
 I personally can't see enough wiggle room both in the ODbL and the CTs
 to make any dataset generated by geocoding and/or reverse geocoding
 anything else than a derivative database. It is just the ODbL working as
 intended. We went through a lot of effort to get from a broken to a
 functional licence that is appropriate for the subject matter and we
 shouldn't be unhappy with the fact that our licence now works (even
 though I like many others, would have preferred a more liberal licence).
 
 We don't have any exact information on the position of the community,
 but I would suspect that we have substantial support for strong share a
 like provisions and that getting a 2/3 majority for relaxed terms would
 be big challenge (I would like to remind everybody that we lost a number
 of quite large mappers during the licence change process due to the ODbL
 being a sell out to commercial interests and not SA enough).
 
 The only way out that I could see to avoid infection of propriety
 information is, along the lines of the suggestion by the LWG, to only
 geocode address information and use the address information as a key to
 look up such propriety information on the fly, the address DB itself
 being subject to ODbL terms. This however wouldn't help in the reverse
 geocoding use case (example: user clicks on a map to locate a bar and we
 return an address, the dataset of such addresses and any associated
 information would probably always be tainted).
 
 Simon
 
 
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Mikel Maron
I don't see the issue with companies complying with like-for-like. There is 
some logistical burden, but that could be offloaded by geocoding services. 
There's something to explain, but there's something to explain with OSM anyhow. 
OSM is open for geocoding, that can be worked out. I don't see the other side 
of the argument here yet, why sharing back only geocoded strings is a problem.

I disagree that reverse-geocoding infects an entire database. That needs some 
clarification.

Google's geocoding terms are not even defined, and it's likely legally than 
anything significantly geocoded using GMaps is property of Google.

-Mikel

* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron



 From: Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com
To: Licensing and other legal discussions. legal-talk@openstreetmap.org 
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US
 

I'd hate to see us give up here, there is too much at stake. The open 
questions around geocoding are doing OSM a disservice just as CC-BY-SA did. 
This is from a commercial community member's perspective just as an 
individual's, assuming we all want a better open map. Opening OSM to geocoding 
would be one of the main drivers for getting better boundary data and better 
addresses. Depending on your read of the license, right now OSM's terms on 
geocoding are potentially stricter than Google's or Navteq's.

I'd love to work with whoever is interested on wording a clarification 
statement and figuring out the process on how to decide on it.

On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:36 AM, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:

 
 I personally can't see enough wiggle room both in the ODbL and the CTs
 to make any dataset generated by geocoding and/or reverse geocoding
 anything else than a derivative database. It is just the ODbL working as
 intended. We went through a lot of effort to get from a broken to a
 functional licence that is appropriate for the subject matter and we
 shouldn't be unhappy with the fact that our licence now works (even
 though I like many others, would have preferred a more liberal licence).
 
 We don't have any exact information on the position of the community,
 but I would suspect that we have substantial support for strong share a
 like provisions and that getting a 2/3 majority for relaxed terms would
 be big challenge (I would like to remind everybody that we lost a number
 of quite large mappers during the licence change process due to the ODbL
 being a sell out to commercial interests and not SA enough).
 
 The only way out that I could see to avoid infection of propriety
 information is, along the lines of the suggestion by the LWG, to only
 geocode address information and use the address information as a key to
 look up such propriety information on the fly, the address DB itself
 being subject to ODbL terms. This however wouldn't help in the reverse
 geocoding use case (example: user clicks on a map to locate a bar and we
 return an address, the dataset of such addresses and any associated
 information would probably always be tainted).
 
 Simon
 
 
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Frederik Ramm

Hi,

On 25.10.2012 17:30, Mikel Maron wrote:

I don't see the issue with companies complying with like-for-like. There
is some logistical burden, but that could be offloaded by geocoding
services.


+1 - I think we're all (including LWG) still waiting for concrete use 
case where somebody says: This is how I want to use OSM for geocoding, 
this is what I believe the ODbL would mean for me, and this is why it is 
unacceptable for my business.


I don't know if it has already been said, but there is a *vast* amount 
of use cases where we need on-the-fly geocoding - user enters address 
and is zoomed to location - which are totally unproblematic as no 
derived database is even created.


In many other use cases I can think of, the ODbL's requirement may mean 
an inconvenience and may mean that users can't be just as secretive as 
they would like to be, but still sufficiently secretive as not to hurt 
their business.


I'm willing to hear concrete examples but I think that talk of giving 
up and too much at stake sound like OSM was unsuitable for geocoding 
which in my opinion it clearly isn't!


Bye
Frederik

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Mikel Maron
 geocoding patient data, client data, suppliers data, members data

With this kind of sensitive private data, the database would not be 
redistributed, hence not invoking share-alike.
 
* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron



 From: Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com
To: Licensing and other legal discussions. legal-talk@openstreetmap.org 
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US
 
+1 for examples. I'm working on pulling some together.

The like for like principle overlooks that data submitted to geocoders can be 
sensitive for privacy or IP reasons. Think of geocoding patient data, client 
data, suppliers data, members data in a scenario where a geocoder is only used 
for a single client. Definitely a scenario where we as MapBox would be able to 
offer an OSM based solution.

On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:

 Hi,
 
 On 25.10.2012 17:30, Mikel Maron wrote:
 I don't see the issue with companies complying with like-for-like. There
 is some logistical burden, but that could be offloaded by geocoding
 services.
 
 +1 - I think we're all (including LWG) still waiting for concrete use case 
 where somebody says: This is how I want to use OSM for geocoding, this is 
 what I believe the ODbL would mean for me, and this is why it is 
 unacceptable for my business.
 
 I don't know if it has already been said, but there is a *vast* amount of 
 use cases where we need on-the-fly geocoding - user enters address and is 
 zoomed to location - which are totally unproblematic as no derived database 
 is even created.
 
 In many other use cases I can think of, the ODbL's requirement may mean an 
 inconvenience and may mean that users can't be just as secretive as they 
 would like to be, but still sufficiently secretive as not to hurt their 
 business.
 
 I'm willing to hear concrete examples but I think that talk of giving up 
 and too much at stake sound like OSM was unsuitable for geocoding which in 
 my opinion it clearly isn't!
 
 Bye
 Frederik
 
 -- 
 Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09 E008°23'33
 
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Alex Barth

On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:43 PM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:

 +1 for examples. I'm working on pulling some together.
 
 The like for like principle overlooks that data submitted to geocoders can be 
 sensitive for privacy or IP reasons. Think of geocoding patient data, client 
 data, suppliers data, members data in a scenario where a geocoder is only 
 used for a single client. Definitely a scenario where we as MapBox would be 
 able to offer an OSM based solution.

The last sentence should be: Definitely a scenario where we as MapBox would 
_love to_ be able to offer an OSM based solution.

 
 On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
 
 Hi,
 
 On 25.10.2012 17:30, Mikel Maron wrote:
 I don't see the issue with companies complying with like-for-like. There
 is some logistical burden, but that could be offloaded by geocoding
 services.
 
 +1 - I think we're all (including LWG) still waiting for concrete use case 
 where somebody says: This is how I want to use OSM for geocoding, this is 
 what I believe the ODbL would mean for me, and this is why it is 
 unacceptable for my business.
 
 I don't know if it has already been said, but there is a *vast* amount of 
 use cases where we need on-the-fly geocoding - user enters address and is 
 zoomed to location - which are totally unproblematic as no derived database 
 is even created.
 
 In many other use cases I can think of, the ODbL's requirement may mean an 
 inconvenience and may mean that users can't be just as secretive as they 
 would like to be, but still sufficiently secretive as not to hurt their 
 business.
 
 I'm willing to hear concrete examples but I think that talk of giving up 
 and too much at stake sound like OSM was unsuitable for geocoding which in 
 my opinion it clearly isn't!
 
 Bye
 Frederik
 
 -- 
 Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09 E008°23'33
 
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 tel (+1) 202 250 3633
 
 
 
 

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Alex Barth

And this is where SA gets really hairy. It's entirely possible and actually 
quite common that part of a database that contains private data is public. E. 
g. public facing web sites that are powered from a Salesforce DB through a 
private API. Again, we need real-world examples. Working on this.

On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:46 PM, Mikel Maron mikel_ma...@yahoo.com wrote:

  geocoding patient data, client data, suppliers data, members data
 
 With this kind of sensitive private data, the database would not be 
 redistributed, hence not invoking share-alike.
  
 * Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
 From: Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com
 To: Licensing and other legal discussions. legal-talk@openstreetmap.org 
 Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 2:43 PM
 Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US
 
 +1 for examples. I'm working on pulling some together.
 
 The like for like principle overlooks that data submitted to geocoders can be 
 sensitive for privacy or IP reasons. Think of geocoding patient data, client 
 data, suppliers data, members data in a scenario where a geocoder is only 
 used for a single client. Definitely a scenario where we as MapBox would be 
 able to offer an OSM based solution.
 
 On Oct 25, 2012, at 2:04 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
 
  Hi,
  
  On 25.10.2012 17:30, Mikel Maron wrote:
  I don't see the issue with companies complying with like-for-like. There
  is some logistical burden, but that could be offloaded by geocoding
  services.
  
  +1 - I think we're all (including LWG) still waiting for concrete use case 
  where somebody says: This is how I want to use OSM for geocoding, this is 
  what I believe the ODbL would mean for me, and this is why it is 
  unacceptable for my business.
  
  I don't know if it has already been said, but there is a *vast* amount of 
  use cases where we need on-the-fly geocoding - user enters address and is 
  zoomed to location - which are totally unproblematic as no derived database 
  is even created.
  
  In many other use cases I can think of, the ODbL's requirement may mean an 
  inconvenience and may mean that users can't be just as secretive as they 
  would like to be, but still sufficiently secretive as not to hurt their 
  business.
  
  I'm willing to hear concrete examples but I think that talk of giving up 
  and too much at stake sound like OSM was unsuitable for geocoding which 
  in my opinion it clearly isn't!
  
  Bye
  Frederik
  
  -- 
  Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09 E008°23'33
  
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 tel (+1) 202 250 3633
 
 
 
 
 
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-25 Thread Eugene Alvin Villar
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:

 And this is where SA gets really hairy. It's entirely possible and actually 
 quite common that part of a database that contains private data is public. E. 
 g. public facing web sites that are powered from a Salesforce DB through a 
 private API. Again, we need real-world examples. Working on this.

Please take note that the legal term database* is different from the
technical term database. Just because one website's data is in just
one PostgreSQL or MySQL database doesn't mean that this whole
database needs to be licensed under ODbL.


* According to the European Database Directive, a database is a
collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a
systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic
or other means.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-24 Thread Martin Koppenhoefer
2012/10/24 andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com:
 As has been noted in the Public Domain subset thread, the contributors
 can make license statement that they like, but the OSMF can still
 enforce the database rights.  So a statement by the contributors (e.g.
 on OSM wiki) that is not confirmed by the OSMF is not very helpful to
 the end user.


what the end user could do: approach the contributor that made the PD
declaration and ask them to give them the data they contributed under
PD conditions ;-). Not sure but I guess this might be only possible if
the user had stored a local copy of the data. If the original
contributor got his (own) data from the OSMF-servers it would
probably be under ODbL even if he himself had contributed it and given
only a non-exclusive license to OSMF. From a practical point of view I
think it would be difficult to determine whether the data was copied
from the OSMF servers of from a local copy though.

cheers,
Martin

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-24 Thread Alex Barth

On Oct 23, 2012, at 10:37 PM, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 As has been noted in the Public Domain subset thread, the contributors
 can make license statement that they like, but the OSMF can still
 enforce the database rights.  So a statement by the contributors (e.g.
 on OSM wiki) that is not confirmed by the OSMF is not very helpful to
 the end user.

Right, there needs to be confirmation by the OSMF.

 
 Cheers
 
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-24 Thread Paul Norman
 From: andrzej zaborowski [mailto:balr...@gmail.com]
 Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US
 
 
 A related question is whether any agreement like that can be made within
 the Contributor Terms.  With the thread about the Public Domain OSM
 subset when someone said that the PD declaration had no real meaning I
 asked myself what made that declaration different from other license
 grants (I'm still not sure).  But a license, according to Wikipedia, is
 an agreement not to sue under some conditions.  An agreement not to sue
 under some conditions is a license.  But the OSMF is bound by the
 Contributor Terms to only grant a subset of the two licenses listed in
 the CT, in their specific versions.  So can it make a statement
 declaring that it would not sue under some conditions (e.g. use of the
 results of geocoding) and keep publishing data from current
 contributions?

The OSMF could state that they won't sue under certain conditions and then
someone could use that statement if later sued by the OSMF. I can't recall
the name of the legal principle off-hand, but an appropriately worded
statement by the OSMF would be binding on them. The decision to sue by the
OSMF is discretionary and they would be stating that they were going to use
their discretion in some cases and not sue. This would not be a
copyright/database license. Most importantly, it would not prevent a
contributor from suing on their own.

 It can probably state that it understands the ODbL 1.0 license to allow
 users to do this and that under given conditions, or to not
 *apply* under some conditions in some jurisdiction (for example in USA).

The OSMF could write opinions but they would only have any value if the
court found part of the ODbL ambiguous. The court's idea of ambiguous could
be quite different from the communities.

 But this could also be abused by declaring something that is in contrast
 with what OSM contributors think, an extreme case being a statement that
 says that ODbL is effectively invalid, or that ODbL = PDDL.  That could
 perhaps be treated as an agreement not to sue, i.e.
 license. 

I am not persuaded that a statement like this is a copyright or database
license.

 So what kind of clarifications (if any) can the OSMF make
 about the licenses?

The problem is the same as human-readable versions of licenses. They aren't
authoritative, and in case of a disagreement with the license text aren't
worth anything.

 As has been noted in the Public Domain subset thread, the contributors
 can make license statement that they like, but the OSMF can still
 enforce the database rights.  So a statement by the contributors (e.g.
 on OSM wiki) that is not confirmed by the OSMF is not very helpful to
 the end user.

Not living somewhere where there are database rights, I'm not sure of this,
but if a contributor uploads a database to OSM (i.e. a .osm file) and then
independently grants the rights to someone else, can that other person then
download the database from OSM, remove all other contributions and use it
under the grant from the contributor? For copyright the answer is a pretty
clear yes. 

It's worth noting that the remove all other contributions step is not
trivial. Even a changeset from a contributor is not generally exclusively
their contributions if they have used any existing data.

This is why I don't think a PD declaration from a user, even if legally
binding, is of any practical use. To use it you'd have to remove the
contributions of other users from their uploads and that requires a full
history database for the area


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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-23 Thread Kate Chapman
Hi Frederik,

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
 Hi,


 On 10/23/12 01:24, Alex Barth wrote:


 Another question that we could ask to enlighten us is: What do commercial
 geocoding providers usually allow you to do once you have paid them? When
 you geocode a dataset with TomTom data and you pay them for that, do TomTom
 then still claim any rights about your resulting database, or do they say,
 like you sketched above, that their license does not extend to the geocoded
 dataset?

I think we need to separate the geocoding engine from the data to
answer this question. I worked for a company where we had geocoded a
huge amount of data (millions and millions of records) with one street
dataset. The dataset began to be too expensive and we looked for
another source. When we switched datasources we had to regeocoded all
the records because the original geocodes were derived from the
original commercial data source.

So essentially it was the lat/lons that were associated with the
original data, but not the address data we had input.

I'm unsure what would have happened to the corrected addresses the
geocoder fed back. We would have fed in the original data again.

-Kate


 Bye
 Frederik

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-23 Thread andrzej zaborowski
Hi,

On 23 October 2012 11:44, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
 ...
 During the license change discussion, my position was often this: Instead of
 trying to codify everything in watertight legalese, let's just make the data
 PD and write a human-readable moral contract that lists things we *expect*
 users to do, but don't *enforce*. - Maybe the same can be done with
 geocoding; we could agree on making no legal request for opening up any
 geodata, but at the same time make it very clear that we would consider it
 shameful for someone to exploit this in order to build any kind of improved
 geocoding without sharing back.

A related question is whether any agreement like that can be made
within the Contributor Terms.  With the thread about the Public Domain
OSM subset when someone said that the PD declaration had no real
meaning I asked myself what made that declaration different from
other license grants (I'm still not sure).  But a license, according
to Wikipedia, is an agreement not to sue under some conditions.  An
agreement not to sue under some conditions is a license.  But the OSMF
is bound by the Contributor Terms to only grant a subset of the two
licenses listed in the CT, in their specific versions.  So can it make
a statement declaring that it would not sue under some conditions
(e.g. use of the results of geocoding) and keep publishing data from
current contributions?

It can probably state that it understands the ODbL 1.0 license to
allow users to do this and that under given conditions, or to not
*apply* under some conditions in some jurisdiction (for example in
USA).  But this could also be abused by declaring something that is in
contrast with what OSM contributors think, an extreme case being a
statement that says that ODbL is effectively invalid, or that ODbL =
PDDL.  That could perhaps be treated as an agreement not to sue, i.e.
license.  So what kind of clarifications (if any) can the OSMF make
about the licenses?

As has been noted in the Public Domain subset thread, the contributors
can make license statement that they like, but the OSMF can still
enforce the database rights.  So a statement by the contributors (e.g.
on OSM wiki) that is not confirmed by the OSMF is not very helpful to
the end user.

Cheers

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US

2012-10-22 Thread Paul Norman
 From: Alex Barth [mailto:a...@mapbox.com]
 Sent: Monday, October 22, 2012 4:25 PM
 To: Licensing and other legal discussions.
 Cc: talk...@openstreetmap.org
 Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] [Talk-us] press from SOTM US
 
 Fair point. Still - I would ask what is the purpose of this protection
 and how does it benefit OSM on this particular level? OSM clearly
 benefits of being used. The usage of OSM data in maps has been
 clarified, I believe the ability to unencumberedly leverage OSM data to
 create produced works is a huge benefit for OpenStreetMap as a whole as
 it creates more versatile map styles, (and yes, abilities to monetize
 them) and in turn have more map users and thousands of micro incentives
 of improving our common map. Important similar incentives are routing or
 geo coding. The latter is where I think the shoe starts to hurt. In my
 mind there's much to be gained by giving better incentives to contribute
 to OSM by clarifying the geocoding situation and little to be lost by
 allowing narrow extracts of OSM. I believe we can do this within the
 letter of the ODbL and within the spirit of why the ODbL was adopted.

Well, by using a share-alike license you are rejecting some uses, just like
if you use LGPL with a library. The issue is that a library has clear
interfaces and there is more extensive case law about what is protected by
copyright whereas the case law and precedents are unclear for geodata.

Where I see the license as trying to prohibit is mixing OSM + other data and
then marketing it as OSM, but better without sharing the other data. You
could be confident that commercial geodata providers would like to do this
for the road network, where they may have poor coverage in areas that OSM
has good coverage. When our address data gets good enough in areas where
they have poor coverage, you can bet they'll look for any ways to do the
same.
 

 BTW, I don't want to know how many people out there have used Nominatim
 for geocoding without having any idea...

Well, for most of the world they're likely fine. I cannot imagine local
courts holding any copyright protection to apply to the output of Nominatim
and I expect they would see the contact provisions (if enforceable) to apply
to the operator of the server, not to the person using it. Of course the
same is likely to apply to anyone offering a geocoder based on data from a
commercial data provider.

The lesson for this? When seeking to enforce your rights on geodata that
covers the world, pick the right country to do so in.


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