Hi André, I know that the situation is quite clear to you. But it obviously it is not to everyone. The point of this discussion is not convincing you. It is about convincing the community. Repeating how certain you are about your opinion and calling others names is not the way to do that.
The WMS license does not explicitly allow copying. Your opinion is that tracing is not copying, but this explicit tracing waiver is demanded for every imagery source used for OSM. A clarification given by SPW is in fact probably enough, but should be according to some standard legal talk (or "gibberish" as you will). It would of course be OK if the SPW added such a statement to their website er even their main license document. I guess the only reason for asking for a PDF is that it gives you a single document to upload to the wiki. A JPG would be just as well. The document is just a way to archive a statement in a reliable way. A copy-pasted e-mail is much less reliable, though the OSMF seems to accept it if really needed. This one document should be written in such a way that it applies to all the WMS that do not have an extra Access document, hence settling the discussion for a whole range of products. It looks clear enough that the helpdesk.carto email address in fact is authoritative, thanks. I didn't think to explain what the OSMF is, sorry. It is the OpenStreetMap Foundation, basically the organizational core of the whole project. I contacted le...@osmfoundation.org to consult their opinion. I've included their replies below. Just like the DWG (data working group) is there to settle data problems between mappers, I thought we could use Legal to settle discussion about licenses. I'm glad to see Thomas Bertels taking the initiative to push this forward in a productive way. Copied from e-mail with legal: >From my personal experience the tracing use case is in general not explicitly covered (or rather the licensors just didn't think of it) by your typical non-standard government terms. Before launching in to a longer discussion of what you might/might not be allowed to do with the imagery and pointing out that this is an area in which national regulations and case law tends to differ a lot, so you would need a lawyer with knowledge of the specifics in Belgium and further that your typical government GIS department employee has no idea of what their terms allow or doesn't allow :-) , I would suggest simply a) formally asking the Walloon government for permission b) getting them to sign a text including the waiver here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3PN5zfbzThqLXg1TUlxalAtVE0/view If necessary I can get somebody from the board to sign/send a letter. We've always accepted e-mails, and I suspect that, while we would like to move to something more formal (say at least a scanned in document as pdf), it might cause too much strife right now. In any case it needs to come from somebody clearly "high enough up" that you can reasonably assume that he can actually commit to the waivers, and the text should be as close to the waiver text as possible. The main aspect is really that it must be clear to them to what they are agreeing, which will, with most sensible people, start the alarm bells ringing and they will talk to their legal department before agreeing to something that they perhaps shouldn't. -- Joost Schouppe OpenStreetMap <http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/joostjakob> | LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joost-schouppe/48/939/603> | Meetup <http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Belgium/members/97979802/>
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