Hello Kate,
On 29.08.2013 02:24, Kate Chapman wrote:
For OSM to be on the safe side: Would it be possible to document the
permissions you have for tracing in a clearly understandable way in the
wiki? The current license text leaves a bit of uncertainty what a derived
imagery product is.
I can document in the wiki my understanding of it. The legal
interpretation of the US government by their own lawyers that the
initial use of the derived vectors need to be for humanitarian use,
after that it is fine to remain under the ODbL license in OSM. The
reason for this is the US Government-wide license for commercial
satellite imagery is not supposed to cut into potential commercial
sales of that imagery. So it would not be possible to release that
imagery for what would be initially a commercial use.
So why not simply add a clause saying "Imagery is used by the members of the
HOT for providing humanitarian aid as expressed in our policy. Derived data
will be stored in the Openstretmap database in accordance with the
contributor terms and is available under the ODbL also after end of the
humanitarian project".
The NextView license is the US Government-wide license utilized for
commercial satellite imagery. It is not going to be possible to add a
clause to it.
I appreciate your work for HOT and like the idea that OSM data is used
to really improve the situation of people.
However, reading this it sounds to me we (as OSM) fully rely on the
legal interpretation of USG lawyers of what use of derived vectors is
allowed.
What happens if a year after providing the imagery they realize that
there are companies selling processed data based on OSM and this data is
based on imagery released for HOT. What happens if they suddenly decide
that this use is not covered as it's neither humanitarian nor
non-commercial?
Would we have to revert large scale of date and all additions built on
top of it?
I'm much in favor of having the data donor fully understand of what are
the consequences of their donation. So they can agree to that and not
feel tricked into something later. And the OSM community can build their
improvements on a solid foundation.
So if it's not possible to add anything to the NextView license: Can we
have a letter from them confirming they fully understand what will
happen with the data in OSM and they still consider it being OK and
covered by their license? Should be not problem at all if they
understood it in the beginning...
If they have issues about handing out a letter confirming commercial use
of OSM data derived from their imagery being fine then we can't accept
their imagery either.
I understand that you probably interpret the license in favor for HOT,
but if this is tainting the data in OSM we have to find a different
solution for HOT - wost case keeping this data separate.
To make it fully clear: I'm not talking about the imagery. I'm talking
about the vector data derived from the imagery. It is absolutely fine if
the imagery is only available to members of the HOT and they use it
only for the humanitarian case for which they had been provided, after
completion of the job the imagery can be removed again.
But the vector data has to be available for OSM under the regulations of
our contributor terms. Meaning available as ODbL or any other license we
might switch to in the future.
Stephan
_______________________________________________
legal-talk mailing list
legal-talk@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
