On 28 April 2013 12:06, Will Phillips <[email protected]> wrote: > I notice rights of way data from a number of county councils is > available on the rowmaps.com site. It is stated that this is available > under the 'Ordnance Survey OpenData licence'. Is there any consensus > over whether it is considered permissible to use this data in OSM? > > I've been working on the understanding that OGL licensed data is > acceptable (I always tag the source). But I am unclear on the current > position regarding the Ordnance Survey OpenData licence.
The OS OpenData Licence adds some additional obligations concerning downstream attribution that are not present in the Open Government Licence (OGL). My view is that these additional obligations make the OS OpenData Licence forwards incompatible with the ODbL+DbCL licence that OSM uses. But not everyone agrees with this view, and OS themselves have given indications to the contrary in the past. However, the most recent definitive statement from OS that I am aware of appears to say that OS's view is that the OS OpenData Licence is not forwards compatible with the ODbL+DbCL. For details see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Licensing/Ordnance_Survey_OpenData_License and http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/os-open-data.html The traditional position of OSM is to be cautious over copyright. So without any legal certainty in the interpretation of the terms, and with the licence owner now stating that the license is incompatible, I think there is no way we can use OS OpenData Licensed content in OSM -- unless we additionally obtain the explicit consent of the copyright holder(s). This is of course rather unsatisfactory, given then amount of Local Government data that is starting to be released under the OS OpenData Licence. Rob Nickerson and myself have tried to raise this problem with the Office of Public Sector Information and the Open Data User Group -- see the request at http://data.gov.uk/data-requests/all-datasets-available-under-the-os-opendata-licence-ordnance-survey , but so far we haven't had any success. There is, however, one set of OS OpenData Licensed data that we can use in OSM, and that is the OS OpenData products themselves. Here OS have given us special permission (at the request of LWG) to make use of OS OpenData (with the exception of CodePoint Open) in OSM. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_Opendata At the moment, if we want to make use of the GIS Public Rights of Way data that Local Authorities are releasing, I think we would need to get explicit permission from OS, and also permission from each Local Authority -- since both have IP rights in the data. This will be a real pain, not least because the Local Authorities are unlikely to appreciate the legal issues or want to go to the trouble/expense of getting their legal people involved. On the brighter side, there is one Rights of Way document that we can get to use in OSM, which avoids any OS IP issues. That document is the "Definitive Statement" -- a list of Rights of Way (with route descriptions) that each Local Authority is legally required to maintain. The route descriptions are variable, depending on the Authority, so some may be more use than others for OSM mapping. For some advice of how to get hold of this document and request permission to use it in OSM, see http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/prow/council-docs.html . Robert. http://robert.mathmos.net/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Robert%20Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
