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Licence/Licence and Legal FAQ: Difference between revisions

Licence/Licence and Legal FAQ (view source)

Revision as of 17:49, 7 May 2013

218 bytes added ,  10 years ago
→‎The OpenStreetMap Geodata License: Reworked this item and dropped CC-BY-SA stuff to a separate entry.
m (typo)
(→‎The OpenStreetMap Geodata License: Reworked this item and dropped CC-BY-SA stuff to a separate entry.)
The OpenStreetMap project provides increasingly extensive map data for the entire world that you can download and use for ANY purpose you like.
 
Usage of the geodata is controlled by a license. The most important thing about the license is that '''you do not have to pay anybody anything to use the data'''. There are '''NO''' copyright, license, usage or other fees. You may use the data for personal, community, educational, commercial, government or any other use that you can think of. We, the OpenStreetMap community, ask only two things in return.
 
Firstly, that you '''attribute''' OpenStreetMap, i.e. you show clearly where you got the data from. A lot of contributors have spent and spend a lot of time and effort adding data from virtually every country in the world. We would also like people to know about our project and perhaps use or contribute data themselves.
 
Secondly, you '''"Share Alike"'''. If you do not make any changes to OpenStreetMap data, then you are unlikely to have a "Share Alike" obligation. But, if you publicly distribute something that you have made from our data, such as a map or another database, andAND you have added to or enhanced our data, then we want you to make those additions publicly available. We obviously prefer it if you added the data straight back to our database, but you do not have to, as long as the public can easily get a copy of what you have done. If you do not publicly distribute anything, then you do not have to share anything.
 
From September 2012, ourOur license is the [http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ Open Database License (ODbL)]. Here is the [http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/ human readable summary] and here is [http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/ the full text].
 
'''Legal Bit!''' Please note that none of this is legal advice. We are but a small not-for-profit, with a goal of publishing big, useful data.
 
==I am using your older data==
 
Data contributed prior to September 2012 continues to be available from our archives under [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ "CC-BY-SA", the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike version 2.0].
Both licenses are broadly the same, you can use the data without payment, provided that you "Attribute" and "Share Alike". However, the new license is specifically written for databases. It offers our project more protection. Attribution is more practical. It is a lot clearer on when "Share Alike" is triggered. It also allows you to make maps with layers from different data with incompatible licenses. In short, we want even more people to use our data.
 
'''Legal Bit!''' Please note that none of this is legal advice. Additionally, underUnder "CC-BY-SA", the individual contributors, not the Foundation, are the licensors of the data.
 
==Is it really free?==
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