Foundation/AGM2023/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos/Q07 OSM Data - Protection
OSM Data - protection, legal threats and vandalism: Protection
What measures do you recommend implementing to guarantee the appropriate safeguarding and adherence to ethical standards in the utilization of OpenStreetMap data? This pertains notably to the enforcement of proper attribution practices and the regulation of two-way data exchange with data-consuming corporations and/or governments.
Roland Olbricht - Q07 OSM Data: Protection
Our license requires the the users to attribute properly. There have been some efforts this year to prepare attribution enforcement in simpler cases. In principle this can go up the point of suing in court or at least engaging a lawyer. Whether this is proportionate will depend from case to case.
Lesser but historically successful means have been "love letters", stickers for printed outdoor maps, or contacting the legal department in a friendly way, notwithstanding other good ideas.
There is no concept of two-way data exchange in OpenStreetMap. Both directions are always independent, and under no circumstances can anyone get a special license for the existing data. Dual-licensing of the data to import is of course possible.
Imports are regulated by the import guidelines and by the Automated Edits Code of Conduct. All of the rules there are set because early non-compliant import attempts have harmed OpenStreetMap. Again, there are no reasons to make exemptions for someone. Community members and/or the Data Working Group has reverted non-compliant imports and rightly so.
Guillaume Rischard - Q07 OSM Data: Protection
The title of the question doesn't really match its text - I'll try to cover it all.
Ethical standards: I have seen OpenStreetMap being used for goals I personally strongly disagree with. The nature of open data is that following the license is the only legal requirement we set, even if we disagree with their ethics.
Not following the license is both unethical and illegal. We currently quietly enforce this in the background.
Legal threats: we rarely need to launch legal threats. Frequently, a friendly reminder is all it takes to remedy an oversight in attribution. The Foundation has recently come up with "Love letters" to ask for attribution. Mateusz and I are finalising the work on making blocking of websites that use our tiles without attribution a lot easier. On share-alike, violations are rare. LWG is aware of one case, and is dealing with it right now. Note that the ODbL merely requires publishing modified data under compatible terms, not contributing that improved data back to OpenStreetMap; in some cases, we might not even want it.
Daniela (Dani) Waltersdorfer Jimenez - Q07 OSM Data: Protection
Włodzimierz Bartczak - Q07 OSM Data: Protection
Due to the increasingly widespread use of OSM data, problems regarding the misuse of OSM data will increase. I think it will be necessary to create tools to easily report such cases, and to establish a working group to deal with these reports, not necessarily based on the work of volunteers. Thus, the fruit of the work of thousands of editors remained unthreatened.
Ivo Reano - Q07 OSM Data: Protection
The definition of freely available data, unfortunately, differs from one country to another and it will be necessary to define the limits of acceptability in a less restrictive way. And evaluate restrictions or expansions on a case-by-case basis, however onerous it may be
OSM Foundation's board election 2023: official questions
Q01 Strategic Plan
| Q02 On imagery sources
| Q03 On Diversity and Inclusion
| Q04 On Fundraising
| Q05 On appointive board-adjacent positions
| Q06 OSMF and Overture Maps Foundation
| Q07 OSM Data: Protection
| Q08 OSM Data: Legal Threats
| Q09 OSM Data: Vandalism
All board candidates' manifestos
2023 OpenStreetMap Foundation's: Board election - Voting information and instructions - Annual General Meeting
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