On 7 June 2010 16:39, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > Richard, > > Richard Fairhurst wrote: >> Secondly, some people (e.g. Frederik) have raised a concern that it >> might be possible to create Produced Works without the attribution that >> Ordnance Survey requires, by licensing the Produced Work as public >> domain - which would not require recipients of the Produced Work to >> reproduce any attribution. >> >> I think this is entirely mistaken.
It's not. The ODbL requirement on produced works only requires a statement along the lines of "Image derived from OpenStreetMap, which is available under ODbL" to accompany the produced work. It does not require the author to place any additional attribution to OS, or AFAIK any restrictions on the image's use by third parties. OS's current license requires this attribution on all works derived from their data. You can comply fully with the ODbL terms without doing this, hence the current OS license is not compatible with including their data in an ODbL licensed database. The point of ODbL is to have a single set of license terms that keeps you legal if you comply with them. We can't say "you must comply with ODbL, and also check for any other restrictions that may apply to some of our source data." (You may argue that the link back to OSM in the ODbL statement is sufficient attribution, as OSM would include an attribution to OS in their sources page. But I think that's debatable, and is certainly something we should check with OS on. Moreover, is the ODbL statement on produced works necessarily viral -- does it need to be added to works derived from ODbL-produced works?) The "insubstantial extraction" allowance in ODbL essentially relies on individual items not being restricted by copyright -- a fact enforced by requiring contributors to license them under DbCL. This is another issue that I don't think OS will be happy with. (You might argue that the individual items aren't copyrightable anyway, but that's not a risk that OSM should be prepared to take.) In conclusion, I think we have the following potential problems if/when we more to the new license / contributor terms: * Current OS license most likely incompatible with ODbL * Current OS license most likely incompatible with DbCL * OS unlikely to agree to granting OSMF additional rights in the contributor terms The first two may well be solved by persuading OS to agree to dual license their data, though DbCL requires them to essentially give up copyright on individual items. The last one will probably need a change of policy by OSMF. I asked OS informally about the produced works issue some time ago and had the following in reply: > You're quite correct about the attribution requirements not applying > under the ODBL where a 'Produced Work' is created. > > As you'll have noticed, the ODBL relies heavily on some quite imprecise > definitions and is not the easiest licence to work with. An important > aim for the OS OpenData licence was simplicity, so we did not want to > spell out the kind of complex exceptions for derivative uses of the data > that appear in the ODBL. We're looking into how we might resolve the > areas of incompatibility between the two. I doubt this represents a complete analysis of the license conditions, but it shows that they (a) regard the produced works attribution as an issue, and (b) would like to resolve it somehow. We can argue about these all we like here, but we really need an OSMF legal expert to investigate, and it would be sensible to get OS's official views on these issues too. Maybe we should also start a campaign to ask them to dual license under ODbL+DbCL as well as CC-By... -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
