[OSM-legal-talk] Further Concerns about ODbL

[Tom Hughes]

David Groom wrote:

> 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.

I suspect the reason for the use of that phrase springs directly from 
the EU concept of database right, which is limited in that it only 
applies to a "substantial" extract of a database.

So database right doesn't apply to extracts which are not substantial 
and can't be used to protect them.

Substantial in that sense is not limited to a pure percentage type of 
consideration though - taking 2.25% that happened to be an entire 
country, or all the motorways in the world, might be substantial while 
take 2.25% of nodes at random might not.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/