(Sending this to wikipedia-l & OSM's legal-talk too)
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason<avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð
Bjarmason<avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So, what we should do is to author a document (on
the wiki?) which
clearly explains why such terms which restrict redistribution and
fields of endeavor mean that free content projects like OSM can't use
the data and will have to keep using SRTM.
Since nobody (especially someone with legal know-how) has offered to
do this I've continued to my correspondence with NASA/USGS/METI using
my own know-how and miscellaneous bits I've scraped from the recent
ASTER threads on this list for support.
Below is an E-Mail I just sent to the NASA/USGS/METI people I'm
corresponding with. I won't include the snippets I'm replying to since
I haven't had permission to publish them, instead I'm going to replace
them with little summaries of the original content. My summaries are
one-liners while the originals are a few paragraphs so obviously
information is lost in the process:
[What's this public OpenStreetMap forum
you're referring to?]
It's being discussed on the main OpenStreetMap "talk" mailing list
(and some other foreign language lists, e.g. the German one). Here's a
list to the thread I started there:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/thread.html#38235
It's a public mailing list so you could sign up if you'd like, or
continue corresponding with me and I could ferry information
back-and-forth.
In any case I'll be submitting what I send to you to the
aforementioned mailing list, but I won't quote any remarks from you
(@nasa.gov/@usgs.gov people) unless I have explicit permission to do
so. So I'll modify this E-Mail so that e.g. the paragraph I'm replying
to now will be replaced by something like "[Where is this being
discussed?]" before I post it. But that's bound to cause confusion so
having permission to quote you when appropriate would be better.
I was hoping that someone with more legal knowledge would be willing
to chime in but that hasn't happened already. I'm just a mapping
hobbyist but I'll try to explain what would be about acceptable terms
for open source/free software projects the best I can.
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/038327.html
[Perhaps your intended use of the ASTER data is
supported, e.g. if you derived tiles intended for some mapping software that would not be
considered redistribution of the original product an could be pushed downstream]
[However if you were intending to distribute the canonical ASTER data as-is that would be
in violation of the terms]
I think I've correctly read between the lines of the download
agreement in assuming that the purpose of that clause is to avoid
Balkanization of the ASTER data, i.e. to make sure that NASA/METI will
always be the canonical source for the source dataset.
If the terms were changed to something like:
You are not allowed to publicly distribute the original ASTER data
files but any derived work can be redistributed freely with (only) the
following restriction:
If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective
Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and
give the original author (NASA/METI) credit reasonable to the medium
or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if
applicable) of the Original Author.
Or something like that then the ASTER dataset could be used to its
full potential by free data projects like OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia &
others. But since there would be no restriction on the fields of
endeavor that generated data could always be used to generate a DEM
again, see a further explanation in this E-Mail:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/038327.html
For instance here's a map where the OpenStreetMap data which is under
the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license has
been combined with SRTM contours:
http://osm.org/go/0CZyDpI--?layers=00B0FTF
The CC-BY-SA license specifies (as do most free software licenses)
that when you distribute derived works you can impose no further
restrictions on the data. That's a pretty much a universal feature of
popular free content licenses to avoid data Balkanization and ensure
compatibility so that e.g. someone doesn't specify the additional
terms that you can't use the derived work for some specific use (e.g.
military), or that you can't use it on a Sunday. Such accumulated
restrictions would quickly make the data unusable for everybody.
Someone could take that map and generate a global DEM by analyzing the
contour lines and distribute a global DEM derived from ASTER free of
the original restrictions, thus circumventing the original limited use
clause.
But in reality nobody is going to go to all this trouble and nobody is
going to be confused about NASA/METI being the original and canonical
source of ASTER data. The best support for this claim is that today
nobody is confused about NASA being the canonical source for SRTM
data. Even though it's in the Public Domain which means downstream
distributors don't even have to attribute NASA for it (although they
nearly universally do anyway).
In summary, not having restrictions on fields of endeavour will open
the ASTER data to use by free content projects which otherwise
wouldn't be able to use it, and nobody is likely to mistake NASA/ASTER
as not being the canonical source for it, especially given
attribution.
As for why I've changed the attribution in the latter paragraph of
those example license terms is pretty much lifted from the CC-BY 2.0
license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
The reason for changing the form of attribution from the current (When
presenting or publishing ASTER GDEM data, I agree to include "ASTER
GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.") is that asking distributors to
include an exact string (in English) leads to what's called the
Berkeley advertising clause problem (as pointed out on the list:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/038237.html),
see this page for an explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clause
Instead if distributors are merely asked to attribute the author
(NASA/METI) that'll serve the same purpose in practice without the
troubles associated with reproducing an exact string, e.g. the
attribution can be translated or otherwise adjusted for the medium.
For instance if the ASTER data was used by someone to extrapolate the
position of mountain peaks and this derived data added to the
OpenStreetMap database we could add a node with a source=ASTER tag,
e.g.:
http://api.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/308406749
Which is appropriate for a relational dataset, as opposed to
reproducing "ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA." for every
object in it.
NASA/METI have updated their distribution terms with a FAQ in response
to my questions:
Unfortunately the new terms aren't new at all, and they still look too
restrictive to be incorporated into freely licensed datasets.