[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL "virality" questions

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Matt Amos wrote:
> 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.

It would work, but I'm trying to think if this would have adverse side 
effects.

Can this be compared to Google importing all of OSM into MapMaker and 
then only making available the OSM part and not anything newly created? 
Would that still count as a collective database? If not, then where is 
the boundary?

I'm going back to this notion of "usefulness". Firstly, is a database a 
database if it is one-dimensional? My feeling is that a database must 
always combine at least two values: Have one, look up the other; have 
the other, look up the first. Is a list of all valid post codes in a 
country still a database if it doesn't have names or geometries? Is the 
list of all latitudes in OSM still a database?

It could be that an extract of some OSM IDs is not even a derived database.

Assuming for a moment it were a database, then, being rather useless, is 
it substantial? Could we perhaps say that if you extract only one 
dimension from OSM, this can never be a substantial extract - a list of 
latitudes, a list of longitudes, a list of keys or a list of values, or 
a list of IDs?

Or could we perhaps even specify that anything that doesn't use our 
geometry is not substantial? A list of all pubs in Madrid would be 
substantial since it needs geometry; a list of all pubs on the planet 
would not be substantial. That would neatly cover anyone wanting to use 
any number of OSM IDs for linking as he would never use the geometry 
from OSM.

But that would again raise a cascading substantial-ness problem - what 
if I publish an OSM extract of Madrid and someone else counts all pubs 
in there.

Bye
Frederik