[OSM-legal-talk] Database Law / extracting non-significant amounts of data, and ODL

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Feb 22 14:14:37 GMT 2008


Hi,

    the current state of discussion/analysis is that a license like  
ODL would offer sound legal protection only where database law  
exists  (e.g. in Europe), while for other jurisdictions (e.g. the US)  
we'd have to rely on the contractual aspect which may be hard because  
the contract doesn't bind third parties to whom the data might be  
passed. How hard exactly it is seems to be a bit murky at the moment.

In this post, I want to focus solely on Europe, i.e. places where  
database law exists.

As far as I understand, database law is a kind of copyright for data  
collections, and it means that if you extract a significant amount of  
data from a database you need permission from the creator of said  
database.

The ODL would be styled such that this permission is granted  
automatically, provided that the user complies with the license (i.e.  
the attribution and share-alike stuff).

What I'm interested in now is the extraction of a "not significant"  
amount of data. I  understand that "significant" is not really  
defined but let's assume I would extract the map data for a little  
village, say 2000 nodes and 200 ways, or about 0.1% of the data we  
have - surely not "significant".

What would be the legal situation? The data is not copyrightable, and  
its extraction does not fall unter database law. Would we, in spite  
of that, try to bind the user to ODL restrictions (attribution/share- 
alike) by contract?

And would the same problems that we're talking about for non-European  
jurisdictions then apply here as well (i.e. I extract the data and  
breach the contract, publish it, another guy uses it)?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'






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