[OSM-legal-talk] Further Concerns about ODbL

[David Groom]

First off all let me state that

1) I am all in favour of resolving the licensing issue (see my comments to 
this list on 1 / 3/ 2007 for example)
2) I'm glad that at last the issue is being addressed

Secondly I am of the opinion that if in moving to a new licence we lose some 
contributors and their data then that might have to be the price of 
resolving the issues.

However having got the above out of the way, I am concerned about the 
current wording of the ODbl license, not just from the perspective of my 
contributions to OSM data, but more importantly from the perspective of OSM.

My current concerns are very specific, and hopefully may simply be down to 
my misreading of the licence, but:

Section 2.2(a) states "The copyright licensed includes any individual 
elements of the Database, but does not cover the copyright over the Data 
independent of this Database."  The copyrighting of the data is covered by 
Section 2.2(b) and here states "Database Rights only extend to the 
Extraction and Re-utilisation of the whole or a Substantial part of the 
Data".

I have real problems with the use of the word "Substantial ".  From my 
interoperation it would appear that extraction and subsequent use of any 
amount of data which is deemed to be "insubstantial" is effectively free of 
any copyright or database rights.

Currently the compressed planet file is 5.1Gb, and for instance the 
compressed extracts for Germany's data is 368Mb, and for the UK 115Mb.  So 
the UK data represents  2.25% of the data, and Germany's data represents 
7.2% of the data.

I would have thought it would be hard to argue that 2.25% is "substantial", 
so if the ODbl was adopted would be effectively be allowing the extraction 
of the whole of the UK data to occur free of any copyright?

David