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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Jean-Christophe Haessig wrote:
> 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

Maybe those who advised you hoped that you would read the ongoing 
discussion before posting ;-)

Your suggestion is similar to what I recently suggested. Your bullet 
points are mostly covered by the current ODbL:

> * the source of the Produced Work is available under the ODbL (at URL…),

Current ODbL mandates[*]that the derivative database on which the 
Produced Work is based must be available which is similar.

> * the authors of the Database are attributed,

This is in ODbL.

> * any reverse-engineering makes the resulting work covered by the ODbL

This is in ODbL.

> * using the Produced Work as a database is forbidden (searching, etc).

This could be said to amount to reverse engineering and would then not 
be forbidden but would lead to the database having to be made available 
under ODbL.

Your suggestion that there is a choice of "either" using a share alike 
license "or" the above actually falls short of our current demands; we 
are discussing that we might perhaps drop the reverse engineering 
restriction from share-alike licensed produced works, but until now 
nobody suggested that the other points (attribution, releasing the base 
derviative database) should be dropped as well if the Produced Work is 
share-alike.

> 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 I hope to have shown, it *is* actually 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)

Oh yes it does, which is the reason why as it currently stands the OdbL 
is unsuitable for creating share-alike produced works.

> 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.

This is true, but then again there are jurisdictions where anything 
goes; I am pretty sure that there are "technically legal" ways even now 
to extract all our data and put in in another form provided you manage 
to be on the right soil for every step. So we should perhaps not go over 
the top. It is unlikely that we'll ever have a license that works in 
North Korea.

Bye
Frederik

[*] (assuming the use<->convey blunder is fixed but it if it isn't then 
ODbL is unlikely to be used for OSM)

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"