Hi, I had an interesting question put to me and would like to hear your opinion.
There's a company that does invoicing for certain types of road works, like cutting grass along a road or cleaning a road. The vehicle used by the workers has a GPS unit, and at the end of the day they have a GPS track. Now they want to write an invoice that basically says "1,5km grass cutting, along roads A, B, C and D - $$$". So what they need is a "reverse geocoding" - they have a GPS track and want some road names for it. Doesn't even have to be perfect, doesn't need house numbers, so OSM data would be fine. Now what would this mean for them, license-wise? (The question they asked is, "can we do that")? My answer was two-part: (1) I'm not sure whether the minuscle amount of data you would use from OSM is actually protected by copyright and would trigger the viral SA element of the license, especially as the data is used around some corners. (2) Even if it would make your invoice a derived work, what would you care? (Can a piece of business communication ever be a CC-BY-SA licensed derived work?) The guy was obviously a bit unhappy with this unclear answer but it was my best shot. What's your opinion? And would it change should the proposed new license get adopted? There's an interesting legal dilemma here in the question whether communication could ever become CC-BY-SA licensed. Data protection and privacy don't normally protect businesses so it would not happen in this example, but I could think of situations where I initiate communication with someone and that someone is bound by legal or professional restrictions to keep the communication private; but what if I make it so that my communication becomes CC-BY-SA derived work? Maybe quite academic, that one. But the previous one about the guy writing invoices was real. Bye Frederik (PS: Could we please simply go PD because then I wouldn't have to waste anyone's time with questions like this...?) -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/legal-talk
