[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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