2013/6/7 Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> > > Over the past months, we've tried to get legal advice on this question. > This is difficult as the lack of existing case law makes it hard to get > official legal opinion on the document and the license is very complex. But > here is what we have heard back informally: > > 1. Geocoding can be interpreted as Produced Work per the defintion of > Produced Work in the ODbL [2]. > 2. The ODbL is too vague in the definition of its terms, requiring > additional clarifications by licensor. This is most importantly the case > around the terms "derivative database" and what constitutes a "substantial" > extraction of data [3]. > > > My take on this is the following:
I don't agree with the approach to just add the statement to OSMF wiki page. What you want to achieve is to establish a Community Norm in order to eliminate a grey area in the ODbL - a grey area as there is room for interpretation and a Community Norm as it is intended to limit the room for interpretations in the sense of the community. Until now there is no official process to establish a Community Norm as well as no process to acknowlege a grey area and its priority to work on it. First we need to establish the process how we create a Community Norm. This is indeed required in order to serve requests like yours. In regards to "Geocoding" this needs to be distinguished from name browsing. I understand Geocoding as the addition of a coordinate to complete address. A "Geocoder" often works in a way that it looksup uncomplete addresses and matches the best result or proposes a list of the best candidates and then completes the uncomplete input to a full and valid address - this is the name browsing part - often considered as part of the Geocoder. From this perspective the Geocoder should be defined first. In regards to adding a coordinate to an address: if you add a coordinate to single address or even a list of addresses then the results remain "unlinked" from the original database - unlinked in the the sense that if you change the underlying database the geocoding results (coordinates) will remain the same - the address is just projected on the orginial database. You would need to "re-geocode" the address in order to adjust the geocoding results. Considering the OSM database and your list of addresses as a combination of two different independent databases - a collective database. Then even after geocoding the two databases would remain indepedent from each other as they are not "linked" to eachother. From this perspective there is not even a grey area. The namebrowsing part is more complicated as you might create a substantial extract from the OSM database - here the defintion of "substiantial extract" is key. Best regards, Oliver
_______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
