I agree that there's no harm in sending another email asking for assent to
more specific terms. I've drafted some suggested language, to make this
easy.
Having recently spoken to a number of parties about Australia's open data
push (specifically address data), including folks from the PM's office and
the NSW government, I doubt the odds of a dual-licensing request meeting
with success are very high. The national government is centralizing and
standardizing its open data program, and it's clear that their default
license will be CC-BY (or possibly a compatible national variant a la
license ouverte).
Andrew has already found someone who feels comfortable offering
clarifications and assurances regarding use and license interpretation;
asking for relicensing is likely to require that she involve other parties,
which could easily derail things. Still, I defer to his judgment about the
best course.
Suggested language follows:
Thanks very much for your help with this matter. I think we understand one
another, but for the sake of clarity, can you agree to the following three
points?
- OpenStreetMap (OSM) may use and incorporate NSW data and derived products
into its database if attribution is provided as previously specified in
this email chain
- You understand that the OSM database into which the NSW data will be
incorporated is presently licensed under the terms of the Open Database
License (ODbL) version 1.0; and that it is possible for the project to
update or change this license (though I should note that this has only
happened once in the project's ten year history)
- You understand that OSM data is reused by various third parties under the
terms of the ODbL ("downstream use") and in ways that make attribution of
all original data sources impossible; and you therefore agree that
downstream use of OSM data including or derived from NSW data is not
subject to the "reasonable" attribution requirements imposed by the NSW
data's CC-BY license
Sorry to make this so formal, but I'm sure you can imagine the consequences
for OpenStreetMap if we fail to make sure our data sources are legally
compatible.
On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) <
robert.whittaker+...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 December 2015 at 21:04, Andrew Harvey
> wrote:
> > Talking with their legal people it was, or at least as far as I
> > understood them, their view that the the ODbL style of attribution
> > (where downstream don't need to provide attribution for any
> > incorporated or derived datasets) is fine within the bounds of the CC
> > BY 3.0 AU license already. They mentioned that the CC license has a
> > concept of attribution reasonable or appropriate for the medium which
> > covered this use case. They also mentioned that when their CC BY 3.0
> > AU data is incorporated into a new work (which is more than just a
> > trivial transformation) then there is no need for downstream
> > attribution within the license.
> >
> > In a way they are merely letting us know of their interpretation of
> > the license that it's terms already meet our requirements.
>
> If their legal people are genuinely happy for the ODbL level of
> attribution (particularly with respect to produced works), then it
> would make everyone's life much easier if they were able to dual
> licence the data under the ODbL in addition to CC-By. Then it's
> completely clear to everyone that use under the ODbL is acceptable,
> and there wouldn't be any need for lawyery discussions, special
> permissions, or user hesitation for particular uses. I guess there may
> be political and/or administrative barriers to prevent this, but it
> might be worth asking them if you haven't done so already.
>
> As far as use in OSM following the current correspondence goes, I
> think the key question is, are they aware that other people could then
> use the OSM data, and that with those uses they may only get indirect
> attribution -- i.e. the user links back to OSM, which would in turn
> link back to them -- even in cases where the data used was dominated
> by their data? It would therefore probably be safer if you could get
> an explicit statement that they're happy for the data to be used in
> OSM, rather than just that they're happy for the attribution that OSM
> provides for its own direct use.
>
> Robert.
>
> --
> Robert Whittaker
>
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