[Aust-NZ] OSM Licensing - [was Fwd: RE: Aust-NZ Digest, Vol 36, Issue 8] [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Robert Coup]

Hi Simon,

(CCing to the list)

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Simon Cropper <
scropper at botanicusaustralia.com.au> wrote:

> On Monday 06 September 2010 11:38:38 am you wrote:
> > Nobody is arguing with that. It's just that CC licenses and particularly
> > CC-BY-SA don't mean what's "on the cover" with respect to datasets.
> > Creative Commons themselves say they shouldn't be used.
>
> Robert,
>
> After many years of publishing books, reports and data, both in traditional
> paper-based form and electronically, it has become apparent to me that most
> people do not think that much about copyright or intellectual property.
>

I agree! in the past this would have been ignored entirely. The number of
people/organisations I speak to about data where the sentiment is "just use
it" and you get a blank look when asking about what license it's available
under....

However, I think people are becoming more aware of the issues. There still
seems to be an anti-commercial sentiment in some sectors. The problem is,
commercial covers nearly anything.

Arguably a researcher working on a project partially funded by a company is
commercial, as is a lone developer who builds a mashup and has some Google
ads on the website.


> I mention this because I recently pointed out to people publishing
> educational
> material in OSGeo that despite stating that they release 'their' document
> under creative commons the data used and images presented, and the data the
> authors pointed the reader to in order to reproduce a method illustrated in
> a
> tutorial were all covered by restrictive licenses conditions. In other
> words
> not all elements of the published work were covered by the license
> specified.
> So despite an author releasing work as a CC-BY-SA, derived works were
> impossible to create as the rights to use, share or reproduce the
> underlying
> data, images, etc had not been obtained.
>
> This issue of copyright or access/usable rights associated with
> 'components'
> of a work is particularly important and is rarely addressed.
>

Yep. I think that'll be next on the awareness list after the larger "work".
Already you're seeing news media getting pulled up heavily around using
citizen photos from twitpic/etc without attribution.


>
> It would be valuable if groups, like Creative Commons group, created an
> interactive key that (1) identified copyrightable/licensable elements of a
> work, then (2) pointed the publisher to the relevant type of licenses
> available.
>
> In relation to the above mentioned license change. What remains ambiguous
> to
> me is what is actually meant by data or databases. Not so much the full
> blown
> relational databases (i.e. fields names, query forms, table relationships,
> coupled with data) as this is obvious but rather the smaller more unusual
> datasets.
>
> For example...
> 1. Data stored in a table in a report.
> 2. Attribute data stored in shapefiles (including field names and codes)
> 3. Vector data or raster data
> 3. Aerial Photography
> 4. Any derived images or maps created with the this data
>

It's definitely designed to cover attribute data & vector data. Maps created
with it aren't covered by the license - they'd be CC-BY-SA for the OSM ones,
and I can't speak to the rest.


>
> It is unclear to me whether this type of data would be covered by the Open
> database License. Better explanation of what is meant by 'data' with good
> examples would be invaluable in helping people understand whether this new
> license is relevant to them.
>

To be honest, I'm not sure what level of applicability there is to other
databases/projects - I haven't looked. Creative Commons/Science Commons have
gone down the path of only recommending Public Domain for datasets. Which is
fair enough, but does leave the share-alike space with nothing.

It would be nice to see a range of content/data licenses presented
concisely, with plain-language interpretations so people can make a good
decision about what is the right license for them.

Rob :)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/aust-nz/attachments/20100908/3860d1b3/attachment.html