The ODbL that we now use for OSM data technically only applies to the database, and not to individual contents contained within it. For that, the ODbL says you need a separate licence [1]. I was under the impression that for OSM's data this licence was the ODC's Database Contents Licence (DbCL) [2].
It therefore surprised me when I read the White Paper at [3], which said that uncertainty over the content licence was a problem for downstream users. When I went to check what the content licence was, I was unable to find any definitive information where I would expect to find it; i.e. at http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright or http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ or http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License . The latter two seem to suggest that the OSM Contributor Terms [4] act as a content licence, but I don't see how that's possible, since the Contributor Terms are concerned with people giving rights and assurances to OSMF, rather than OSMF providing rights to data users. The Contributor Terms themselves mention the DbCL as one of the possible licences OSMF can use, but don't actually say that OSMF are using it for current data downloads. So can I enquire as to exactly what the content licence is for OSM's geodata, and suggest that it is made clearer on the pages linked above? I guess some people may argue that the individual data items in OSM are facts and so aren't copyrightable anyway. However, it's not obvious to me that this is necessarily the case for all the data items (there are certainly some things in OSM that are subject to creative judgement) and it would seem that uncertainty over the content licence is a real issue for data users. Even if an explicit content licence may not be necessary, it would surely be good to soecify one like the DbCL anyway. Thanks, Robert. [1] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ [2] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1-0/ [3] http://spatiallaw.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-odbl-and-openstreetmap-analysis-and.html [4] http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Contributor_Terms -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
