Licensing Working Group/Minutes/2023-10-16

OpenStreetMap Foundation, Licensing Working Group (LWG) - Agenda & Minutes
16 October 2023, 17:00 UTC

Participants

• Kathleen Lu (Chairing)
• Simon Hughes
• Tom Lee
• Tom Hummel
• Dermot McNally
• Guillaume Rischard (OSMF board)

Absent

• Jim Vidano

Administrative

Adoption of past minutes

• 2023-09-11 Approved

Previous action items

• 2018-03-08 All to look at the Working Groups collecting personal information.
• 2018-04-12 LWG to follow-up on the iD editor, as the number of changesets is now included on the changeset comments thread.
• 2020-10-08 Simon Poole and Guillaume Rischard to look at the translation issue of the copyright policy page
• 2020-10-08 Jim Vidano to work on updating the privacy policy in relation to OSMF's use of a commercial CDN, and Kathleen Lu will have a look at it.
• 2021-01-14 Guillaume Rischard to report on Board status re identification of outside counsel
• 2021-02-11 Kathleen Lu to check LWG-specific membership requirements on the OSMF website and Conflict of Interest policy and provide to Dorothea any updates for the website.
• 2021-03-11 Guillaume Rischard to sort out various email issues - Making sure Dermot McNally is on the main legal mailing issue, making sure everyone is getting OTRS email notifications for the legal queue.
• 2021-07-08 Guillaume Rischard to meet with Dermot McNally about using OTRS.
• 2021-07-08 LWG members to provide comment on the HOT draft trademark agreement on the next meeting.
• 2021-07-08 Jim Vidano to look at next steps for Opensnowmap.org paperwork after the trademark request has been approved by the board.
• 2021-07-08 Dermot McNally to ask Tobias for expected outcome regarding the request for change of the text of the standard tile license.
• 2021-08-12 Tom Hummel to suggest text to be published regarding OSMF's legitimate interest in processing personal data.
• 2021-08-12 Dermot McNally to reply to Tobias about simplifying the text of the tile licence.
• 2021-08-12 Dermot McNally to make the pull request on GitHub openstreemap-website regarding attribution requirements for OSMF tiles
• 2021-08-12 Dermot McNally to communicate back to contacts regarding Australian data attribution and suggest filling the waiver template.
• 2021-08-12 LWG to identify OSMF legal texts that might be needed under German law to be in German.
• 2021-09-09 Jim Vidano to ask Simon Poole whether he has previous emails contacting companies that were not displaying attribution.
• 2021-09-09 Guillaume Rischard to check past emails (e.g. last year ones related to case in Germany where they settled in court) for any sent to companies not complying with attribution requirements and to send what he finds, including links to the GitHub repositories with the lists of not complying organisations, to the Signal group.
• 2021-09-09 Jim Vidano and Dermot McNally (2021-12-09) to create a draft template email for the community to contact organisations regarding non compliance with the attribution guidelines
• 2021-09-09 Dermot McNally to reply to Jean-Marc Liotier (board of directors) with the LWG decision to create a template email for minor cases of non-compliance with the attribution guidelines available to the community and the LWG to directly contact bigger companies.
• 2022-01-13 Simon Hughes to download a copy of the Copyright FAQ page and mark anything that is not matching the attribution guidelines or is confusing and circulate that to the LWG.
• 2022-04-14 Guillaume Rischard to ask Tom Hughes to see how many translations of the Copyright and Copyright FAQ page are live. Topic Needed: Update to Copyright FAQ page to match new attribution guidelines
• 2022-04-14 Guillaume Rischard to update agenda with Navionics (Garmin) success. Topic Fixing attribution success
• 2022-06-09 Guillaume Rischard to check with Amanda regarding the return-to address she used to the letter about printed maps with false copyright
• 2022-06-09 Guillaume Rischard to check with the rest of the board about the advice on CWG with LWG to rework the copyright page.
• 2022-09-15 Dermot McNally to send an email to the companies mentioned on Ticket#2022011910000082 and Ticket#202201261000014
• 2022-09-15 Guillaume Rischard to respond to the email Ticket#202208041000024 and redirect to the right person.
• 2022-10-13 Guillaume Rischard to take the Ticket#2022100310000013 issue to the board (related to legal consequences for “unlicensed surveying”)
• 2022-11-10 Guillaume Rischard to ask someone else on the Philippines community regarding proof of the use of OSMF trademarks there.
• 2022-11-10 Guillaume Rischard to pass the message to the board member who wrote to the LWG about Open Database License (ODbL).
• 2023-03-06 Kathleen Lu to write back to Iiro Laiho (Inquiry re Finnish satellite imagery) and have them clarify that the attribution is ok. The LWG to update the attribution.
• 2023-04-03 Guillaume Rischard to ask Grant Slater regarding passing LWG tickets to OWG.
• 2023-04-03 Dermot McNally to find wording that makes it clear to the recipients of the love letters that the letters come from mappers.
• 2023-04-03 Guillaume Rischard to send the Attribution Guidelines (Case of German Federal Mapping Agency buried attribution)
• 2023-04-03 Tom Lee to reply to the OSM Serbia community on GitHub asking for additional details (Ticket#2023030810000178 - Serbian Geodata)
• 2023-04-03 Dermot McNally to put Benito Romualdo Palma Temoaya in touch with the Mexican community (Ticket#2023032410000272 – Asesoría)
• 2023-05-15 Dermot McNally to write a template reply for emails we receive regarding missing attribution and send it to Kathleen.
• 2023-05-15 Kathleen Lu to create an OTRS template with Dermot’s template reply regarding missing attribution.
• 2023-05-15 Simon Hughes' trademark person to draft a physical merchandise template. Existing templates on domain names and State of the Map conference can be used.
• 2023-05-15 Kathleen Lu to write to the person that contacted the LWG regarding OSM merchandise that the Board is considering the issue.
• 2023-06-12 Guillaume Rischard  to ask Grant about how to block addresses in OTRS.
• 2023-06-12 LWG to suggest to Mapilio to modify the wording regarding permission to OSM, to make it clearer.
• 2023-07-10 Guillaume Rischard  to ask Grant regarding reducing the amount of spam on the privacy OTRS queue.
• 2023-07-10 Tom Lee offered to delete spam messages on the privacy OTRS queue.
• 2023-07-10 Dermot McNally to ask Guillaume about the contact details of the Latin American group, in order to contact them about Ticket#2023032410000272 – Asesoría
• 2023-08-14 Kathleen Lu to write back that LWG voted this is okay. [Topic: Ticket#2023081110000064 — First party websites as sources]
• 2023-08-14 Kathleen Lu to contact Stamen and Stadia Maps [Topic: Email with complaint that OSM is used to display on a map supposed incidents where foreigners might have become perpetrators of crimes]
• 2023-09-11 Kathleen Lu to add the "template response to missing attribution reports" to the OTRS queue.
• 2023-09-11 Kathleen Lu to email OWG and ask them to add the following two templates to the OTRS group queues (LWG, DWG, MWG, etc): 1) template response to missing attribution reports 2) user deletion request template.
• 2023-09-11 Kathleen Lu to request tweak: By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and the [OpenStreetMap] Foundation’s [Contributor Terms]. [MapBuilder].
• 2023-09-11 Kathleen Lu to reply "Feel free to disregard." [Topic: From OWG - allegedly Russian email].
• 2023-09-11 Simon Hughes to ask Geolytica whether they have removed all the OSM data, and not just for TomTom.

Any updates on reported attribution cases?

Reports in OTRS:

• Ticket#2021081210000057 printed maps with false copyright
• Ticket#2022011910000082 interparcel.com: Dermot Emailed them on 10th Nov, no reply
• Ticket#2022012610000149 https://poster.printmijnstad.nl/editor/city
• Ticket#2022033010000217
  • complaint that Aberdeen city council may not be attributing correctly – https://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/news/consultation-starts-street-improvements-ashgrove-road
  • Note that Aberdeen credits Ordnance Survey, so possible OS is using OSM as one of many sources and the full attribution is not getting carried through
• Ticket#2022032710000125 - https://www.evri.com/find-a-parcelshop
  • Hermes UK changed name to evri. So this is an old issue.
• Ticket#2022062610000078 -
  • Härryda, Sweden, uses Open Street Map for an app they developed. Inside the app there are no license references to OSM.
  • You can see the app on the Google Apps store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.harryda.medborgar.app&gl=US
• Ticket#2021120810000146 mondialrelay.fr not attributing correctly

Trademarks – any updates?

Guillaume - HOT trademark agreement update

Not discussed.

OTRS templates have been added – if anyone is missing access, please flag

• Kathleen added the templates to OTRS (attribution and deletion requests).
• Already used the deletion template.
• Has not yet sent emails to historic cases reporting missing attribution.
  • It might not be worth emailing those older than a couple of months.

LWG members with OTRS access issues to notify Kathleen.

Geolytica - Update from Simon Hughes

Initial email to LWG Sorry if this ruins anyones Sunday.

My employer buys POI data from Geolytica. I took a look at it yesterday. It's full of OSM data, I've attached a small sample, grepped for "local knowledge". I noticed because "Source_URL" is basically a one to one copy of OSM. I can provide the full dataset if required, but this is probably the biggest ODBL violation ever. I have no idea how many Geolytica customers there are.

https://poidata.xyz/

Previous LWG discussion: 2023-09-11

Geolytica:

• 5 person company.
• Data offered had OSM tags, that's how TomTom identified the issue.
• They've taken OSM data from the scraped data offered to Tom Tom.
• The removal was quick.
• Not clear if OSM data has been removed from data offered to other Geolytica customers.
• People can download test data from their website.

On contacting OSMF
Geolytica said that they would contact OSMF directly.

• Probably contacted Kathleen on OSM US Slack and said they had an update and would come back.
• We could download test data from their website.

[Brief discussion about scraping].

Moving OSMF to EU country (Belgium?): Any update by Tom Hummel? Able to connect with the lawyers from Bird&Bird that Kathleen referred?

AGIO legal firm

• The board approved AGIO looking into the Contributor Terms.
• Sarah Hoffmann seems to be committed to use their services.

Bird & Bird legal firm

• They are knowledgeable but they can get very expensive quickly.
• Tom Hummel exchanged emails with them.
• They wanted to set up a second meeting with quite a 5-10 attorneys and sent us an engagement letter. The meeting would have to be paid.
  • Dropped by board due to cost.

Third legal firm

• Guillaume contacted a company in Luxemburg who recommended another firm. Guillaume has not contacted that second firm.

Suggestions

• AGIO: See their feedback on the Contributor Terms and decide on how to proceed.
• Bird & Bird: Get a second quote on the project. Tom Hummel or Sarah Hoffmann (board) to:
  

1. Ask them if they have experience with the issue and what they have done for other non-profits, before signing any engagement agreement.
2. Make it clear that it will be a sales call.
3. Mention that we hope they can provide us with fixed fees for each stage of this project.
4. Suggest having the meeting with just a few attorneys.

Ordnance Survey Ireland - Dermot McNally found that they will be releasing Geodata under CC-BY

Background

• due to a new-ish Implementing Regulation (HVD-IR) [2] to the PSI directive [3] EU member states will be obliged to release significant amounts of geo- and other data, freely, HVD-IR Annex 1, i.a.
  • under »CC-0, CC-BY or an equivalent or less restrictive open licence«
  • open machine readable format (I think INSPIRE prescribed [4])
  • by API ∧ download
  • free of charge; possible exemption though 2024, Art.14(5) PSI

• we were poking about which licenses gov’ts might be bound to or opt for
  • CC-0, CC-BY are mentioned explicitly by the Regulation (in that order)
  • some countries have CC-BY lookalikes; compatible with Art. 4(3) HVD-IR?
  • there’s some administrative inertia → confusion…

conclusion: shall we reassess the situation on ODbL/CC-BY 4.0 compatibility and our waiver practice?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2023/138/oj
Article 4
Arrangements for re-use applicable to all categories of high-value datasets
1. An exemption granted by a Member State in accordance with Article 14(5) of Directive (EU) 2019/1024 shall be published online, in the same way as the list of public sector bodies referred to in Article 6(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/1024.
2. To facilitate the availability of datasets for re-use covering longer periods of time, the obligations imposed under this Regulation shall also apply to existing machine-readable high-value datasets created before the date of application of this Regulation.
3. High-value datasets shall be made available for re-use under the conditions of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) or, alternatively, the Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence, or any equivalent or less restrictive open licence, as set out in the Annex, allowing for unrestricted re-use. A requirement of attribution, giving the credit to the licensor, can additionally be required by the licensor.
4. High-value datasets shall be made available in accordance with the arrangements for the publication and re-use as set out in the Annex.

The Ordinance Survey of Ireland is now under the auspices of a combined land registry and government mapping agency. They've identified data sets, such as various boundaries, that would typically be hard to get ground truth on. Some of the data could be imported into OSM and is under CC-BY.

• OSM Ireland has a board meeting tomorrow.
• Dermot expects that the local community will want to pursue a waiver and that the the IE governmental agency will want to be mentioned at the sources page.
• An OSM IE board member knows someone on the agency.
• Previously limited data has come from open government licence.

- National mapping agency selling mapping data.
- Postal code dataset including addresses is proprietary.
- Commercialisation wasn't stellar and governments got complains that it is behind a paywall.

Next step: get a waiver.

Suggestion

• can ask for CC0 licence.
  • that would happen very slowly, better get the waiver now.

Tom Lee and Simon Hughes had to disconnect 54' and 57' after start.

Request from Czech local chapter

Background The CZ local chapter is trying to get several datasets from the national cartography and cadastre office to be usable in OSM. Lately, they publish some of these data as open, but unfortunately with CC-BY 4.0. We tried to contact them to ask for a solution of license incompatibility and unfortunately instead of some discussion, they replied back (with officially signed) letter, they agree for these data to be used in OSM but they require to be mentioned on the copyright web page the same as Spain. After long discussions mainly supported by Mikel Maron, the recommendation is to ask LWG to approve the pull request prepared:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/4170

(and add CZ translation later via translatewiki.net). This will allow us to use several important datasets with whole Czech republic coverage in OSM, which will highly increase our ability to fill gaps in the map while being legally correct.

The Czech local chapter has a dataset which is licensed under CC-BY 4.0, that they would like to import to OSM. They have signed a waiver and before importing, they asked to add the Czech Republic to the list of sources.

• They submitted the pull request to the website in order to be added to the list of source and the LWG has been tagged to approve.
• In previous cases with governmental data under CC-BY 4.0 we have asked for a waiver to be signed.
• The sources page also mentions datasets under CC-BY 4.0 from the following countries: Australia, Austria, New Zealand, Spain.

Concern

• Receiving too many similar requests in the future.
  • We'll end up with better data.

Suggestions

• Clean up the sources page.
• Change the sources page into a map, if it gets too big.

Vote

Unanimous approval of the pull request.

Action item: Kathleen Lu to comment on the pull request, that the LWG voted and approved the addition.

Re-discuss the compatibility issue of ODbL and CC-BY?

Tom Hummel is wondering whether the LWG would like to re-discuss the compatibility issue of ODbL and CC-BY, as it would make things very easy in the future within the EU.

Kathleen Lu tried to address the incompatibilities when CC-BY 4.0 came live and couldn't do it. She has written a blog post about it.

• The directive https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1561563110433&uri=CELEX:32019L1024 explicitly mentions CC-BY 4.0.
• The regulation asked the government agency to choose either CC0, CC-BY 4.0 or another license, and they will probably have to provide internally a reason to choose CC-BY over CC0.
• Many EU counties will release in future data sets under CC-BY.
• Hope that the countries will not generate many CC-BY lookalikes.
• Governments that will use CC-BY for new data, will use the most recent version (4.0).
• A lot of governments don't know that open government license exists and that it's compatible.

Other points mentioned

• 2013 directive has been implemented everywhere. 2021 might still be in the process of getting implemented.
• It is a shame that there doesn't seem to be any party that doesn't want this data sharing to happen in any of these engagements and yet we can't overcome the challenge of compatibility.
• OSM is more risk-averse than a typical company.
• Problem: a lot of data and players.

Suggestions

• The board to send a strong statement about what these governments should do as they're evaluating these licenses, e.g. providing the reasons why they should choose CC0 or CC-BY or providing a pre-filled form that will grant a license to OpenStreetMap.
• Tom Lee to talk to Marianne at TomTom and Courtney (CWG, ex TomTom).

Action item: Tom Lee to create a draft statement by the next LWG meeting that could be used by the board to encourage governments to publish under CC0, ODbL, OGL or with a waiver to OSM.

Queries to legal-questions

Ticket#2023032410000272 – Asesoría

Background by LWG Buenas tardes. Solicito su apoyo amablemente para asesoría en contribución de información a la plataforma de OSM. La cual contempla información de tipo vectorial: líneas (nomenclatura de calles oficiales del municipio de Temoaya, Estado de México, México) y polígonos (límite de localidades oficiales del municipio de Temoaya, Estado de México, México, así como el límite oficial del municipio de Temoaya, Estado de México, México). Lo anterior conservando las etiquetas correspondientes a: - nombre de calle (línea), - nombre de localidad (polígono) - superficie  (polígono) y, - notas adicionales (en polígonos). Gracias. agradecería bastante su apoyo.

Saludos.
Benito Romualdo Palma Temoaya, Temoaya, C.P. 50850, Estado de México, México.

Google translation by LWG:
Good afternoon. I kindly request your support for contribution advice of information to the OSM platform. which includes information on vector type: lines (nomenclature of official streets of the municipality of Temoaya, State of Mexico, Mexico) and polygons (limit of localities officials of the municipality of Temoaya, State of Mexico, Mexico, as well as the official limit of the municipality of Temoaya, State of Mexico, Mexico).
The above keeping the labels corresponding to: - street name (line),
- locality name (polygon)
- surface (polygon) and,
- additional notes (in polygons).

Thank you. I would greatly appreciate your support. Greetings.

Previous LWG discussions: 2023-09-11, 2023-08-14, 2023-07-10, 2023-06-12, 2023-05-15, 2023-04-03

Dermot has replied to the ticket in auto-translated Spanish linking to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ES:LatAm

Ticket#2023091010000233 grüntegernbach

Background by LWG ich benutze auf meiner Webseite eine interaktive OpenStreetMap-Karte,

die vor einer Weile auch noch sehr gut funktioniert hat:
https://www.grüntegernbach.de/kreuze.html
Kürzlich habe ich bemerkt, dass die einzelnen Kartenausschnitte nicht mehr geladen werden. Als Fehlermeldung kriege ich 403/Forbidden. Ich habe im Netz versucht herauszufinden, warum das so ist, und bin immer wieder auf die Richtlinien von OpenStreetMap verwiesen worden. Ich habe meine Seite überprüft und denke, dass ich mich an die Vorgaben gehalten habe, insbesondere den Verweis auf die Copyright-Seite. Jetzt weiß ich nicht mehr weiter und frage deshalb hiermit nach, was ich falsch mache und ändern muss, um Ihre Karte wieder benutzen zu können.

[google translation]
I use an interactive OpenStreetMap map on my website, which worked very well a while ago:
https://www.grüntegernbach.de/kreuze.html
Recently I noticed that the individual map sections are not be loaded more. I get 403/Forbidden as an error message. I I've been trying to find out why this is on the internet and I'm always Reference has been made again to the OpenStreetMap guidelines. I have checked my site and think I followed the guidelines have, especially the reference to the copyright page. Now I know I can't go any further, so I'm asking what I'm doing wrong and must change in order to be able to use your map again.

They should be using tile.osm.org

Action item: Guillaume Rischard to follow-up.

Next Meetings

2023 LWG meeting dates:
Monday Nov 13 – back to 1800 UTC
Monday Dec 11, 1800 UTC
Monday Jan 08 2024, 1800 UTC

US daylight savings start - Mar 12 2023
EU daylight savings start - Mar 26 2023
EU daylight savings end - Oct 29 2023
US daylight savings end - Nov 5 2023

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