[OSM-legal-talk] Difference between a Produced Work and a Derived Database

[Jean-Christophe Haessig]

Hello,

I posted a comment on co-ment and on the wiki use cases page, where it
didn’t seem to belong. I was advised to post it here, so here it is, and
please forgive me for the cross-posting if any of you have already read
it. Anyway, that idea seemed to hover around in the last thread.

In its current form, the ODbL does not state what a Produced Work is
(image, SVG…) but tries to distinguish PWs from databases.

In fact, we might not have to define what a Produced Work is. Instead,
we could let the producer of the derived work fully decide: if he
decides he made a Derived Database, he must publish it under the ODbL.
If he decides he made a Produced Work (even if it is, in fact, a
database), then the license should just make minimal demands on the
terms of the license he will apply to it. Either it is a share-alike
license, or it is a license that states the following:
* the source of the Produced Work is available under the ODbL (at URL…),
* the authors of the Database are attributed,
* any reverse-engineering makes the resulting work covered by the ODbL
* using the Produced Work as a database is forbidden (searching, etc).

Smart users will always be able to use some tool to search in a SVG file
with some SVG searching utility, but this would be harmless. The key
point is that a company could not distribute in any practical manner a
modified database as a Produced Work and tell their users just to use it
with app X to use it, because it would be advertising forbidden
practices. Publishing a database as a PW would render it mostly useless.

Of course, the above assumes that the ODbL will make clear restrictions
on the licensing terms of Produced Works, which seems not quite the case
as of the current version. Other people have been asking how the use of
PWs can be controlled without making restrictions on their licensing
terms (the reverse enginering clause does not require that it is copied
to the PW’s license). If anything has been written by a lawyer about
that, i’d like to read it.

Then, if I understood well, there might be jurisdictions where data is
not copyrightable, which means that any PW under a SA license might be
used to reverse-engineer the DB.

JC


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