Copyright infringement

[richardbrinkman]

ScalableMaps are selling rendered (PDF / Adobe Illustrator) maps using Openstreetmap. The terms of use of ScalableMaps state the following:

You are** not allowed** to:

• Resell this map as stock art in any format or media.
• Publish this map on a website in an editable vector graphics format, either for profit or for free.
• Distribute this map in an editable vector graphics format to 3rd parties, either for profit or for free.

The second and third restriction violates the openstreetmap license:

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.

[JRA (Jukka Rahkonen)]

I would say that these maps are Produced works and they can be published under any license according to ODbL http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/.
However, I know that many of us will consider that PDF vector map is a derived database and therefore it should be share alike and under ODbL.

What seems to be missing from the ScalableMaps site is the notice that is required in the section 4.3 in the ODbL license:

4.3 Notice for using output (Contents). Creating and Using a Produced Work does not require the notice in Section 4.2. However, if you Publicly Use a Produced Work, You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from the Database, Derivative Database, or the Database as part of a Collective Database, and that it is available under this License.

[richardbrinkman]

A Database is defined as:

A collection of material (the Contents) arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means offered under the terms of this License.

Clearly the PDF/AI file is a collection of material (nodes and vectors), which are arranged in a systematic or methodical way (as a map) and individually accessible (Adobe Illustrator can access the individual nodes and vectors) by electronic or other means offered under the terms of this license (the file can be downloaded electronically from ScalableMaps). So clearly the PDF/AI files fall under the definition of Database.

It is even possible to write an application to convert the PDF/AI file back into Postgre-SQL.

[JRA (Jukka Rahkonen)]

I said I knew this. There are also people who consider that a raster map is also a database because it is arranged in a systematic way and there are tools like http://www.gdal.org/gdal_polygonize.html which can recognize shapes from the image and convert them into vectors which can be saved back into database.

I suggest you to write a mail to legal-talk@openstreetmap.org, our experts should be reading that list.

[Breki]

Hi,

I’m the author of ScalableMaps. As I repeatedly suggested to Richard, he should have turned to OSM legal-talk to discuss this. I’m certainly not brave (and lawyer) enough to claim that something is “clearly” a Derivative Database as opposed to being a Produced Work by ODbL’s definitions. That’s why in the past I’ve asked several times about this on the legal-talk, here’s one of the threads: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/OSM-legal-talk-Licenses-for-Produced-Works-under-ODbL-td5732278.html (my question is below).

What seems to be missing from the ScalableMaps site is the notice that is required in the section 4.3 in the ODbL license

I’m happy to add a 4.3 notice about the ODbL license.

As for the PDF/AI files offered on ScalableMaps, they do not directly encode any geo metadata, OSM IDs or tagging data. The shapes have been simplified to reduce the size of the final file, features categorized differently than the original OSM tags (etc.) so even if you decide to reverse-engineer it, it would be far from a perfect copy of the original OSM data. And even if you did that, that one would then indeed become a Derivative Database (based on what people are saying on the legal-talk list), so it would fall under ODbL.

If the definition of what constitutes a Derivative Database is “something that can be reverse-engineered into a geo DB”, then I would like to see an example of a thing that can be a Produced Work under such a wide definition. As JRA mentioned, even rasters can be vectorized, so it’s just a question of how much/how good the reverse-engineered data can be extracted, not whether it can be.