On 7 June 2013 01:56, Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> wrote: > With two State of the Map conferences coming up now and plenty of > opportunities for face time, I'd like to restart our conversation around > clarifying the ODbL's implications for geocoding and get to a result. Over > here at MapBox we're hoping to use OpenStreetMap soon as much as possible > for geocoding (right now we don't) and we'd like to do this on firm legal > ground. I know that others have raised similar questions in the past [1].
For the avoidance of doubt, could you clarify exactly what you mean by "geocoding" here? I presume it would be something along the lines of taking some form of location description (e.g. a typical written address), searching for an appropriate match in an OSM-derived database, and then returning the latitude and longitude coordinates associated with the matching OSM object. This process could possibly be repeated many times, once for each record with a location description in an external database. In that case, then from a philosophical point of view, I think I'd agree that other data about the location found in the database shouldn't be tainted by share-alike. But at the same time, I don't think that the coordinates should be available to be completely freely used by the person obtaining them. As for the actual location data used in the search, I think that's a more difficult question. On the one hand, it's sort of necessary to do the search and interpret the coordinates, so we'd want it to be shared). On the other hand, while individual location data items aren't really proprietary, the collection of them could be (e.g. identifying a set of customers), so there may be reasons why it wouldn't be appropriate to share it. My reasoning behind not wanting to allow the coordinates to be used freely would be that I could, for example, produce a list of all possible post box reference numbers in the UK since they're always a postal district plus a 1-4 digit number. Then I could use OSM to get coordinates for each reference number where it existred. If I was able to freely use the resulting data without any restrictions, I'd then have a public-domain dataset of all the post box locations that were in OSM, sidestepping the share-alike provisions of ODbL. I think this would be unacceptable. It seems to me, that each location description (whatever was used to search in OSM) plus the returned coordinates should probably be regarded as a derivative database, which then forms part of a collective database with any other (possibly private) data associated with the location description. It's only if you "publicly use" the data that the share-alike provisions kick in, and then you'd only need to share the location descriptions and coordinates for points that are shown to a user (which would probably be visible to them anyway). Remember that the share alike provisions only apply to those receiving the "public use" of the work. So if you only provide something based on the data to a particular customer, that's the only person you have to allow share-alike use to. (Of course there's nothing to stop the customer sharing that data further, but that's up to them.) Would something like this be a problem for any of the use cases that you have in mind? Of course, if you can argue that your geocoding results are "insubstantial" under the ODbL then you can do what you want with them. The above would only apply to "substantial" uses. Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
