[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL "virality" questions
Matt Amos
zerebubuth at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 16:32:14 BST 2009
On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Matt Amos wrote:
>> this is the crux of the question. the ODbL makes no distinction
>> between lat/lon data, ID data, or any other sort of data. so the
>> question then becomes; if i'm using some data from an ODbL database
>> and incorporating that into my database, do i have to release all of
>> my database, or just the bits of it which came from or were derived
>> from the ODbL database?
>
> Let's look at the reason why we have this whole viral license, shall we?
>
> (I'm taking off my "this is all stupid and we should do PD" hat for a
> moment and act as if I were a share-aliker.)
/me adjusts headgear also.
> The idea behind this is that we don't want to give anything to people
> which they then make proprietary - the worst case being that one day OSM
> ceases to exist and only some proprietary copy remains. The license is
> there to ensure that OSM data remains free.
>
> But a site that *only* takes OSM IDs in order to link to them does not
> create anything of their own. If OSM one day ceases to exist then the
> OSM IDs stored in that site become worthless. They only store pointers
> into our database, they don't make a derived product. (If I tell you to
> download a film and skip to 6'32 because that's where the action is, am
> I creating a "derived work" of that film?)
no, but a time code pointer into a copyrighted work isn't necessarily
a good analogy for an ID extracted from a database rights-protected
database.
> You are right in saying that by the letter of the license, an id is data
> just like anything else. But the spirit surely affects only *useful* data?
i think i can hear lawyers having heart attacks over the word "useful" ;-)
can the SA requirement be satisfied by saying that we consider the
extracted IDs to be an ODbL part of a collective database, where the
proprietary data is the other part? it would require the ODbL part
(i.e: the list of IDs) to be made available, but nothing else.
cheers,
matt
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