[OSM-legal-talk] Protection time of ODbL

[Iván Sánchez Ortega]

El Martes, 29 de Septiembre de 2009, Jukka Rahkonen escribió:
> How long time ODbL will protect the data?  The EU database directive
> "Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11
> March 1996 on the legal protection of databases" gives 15 years protection

The thing to understand here is that copyleft licenses are an exercise of your 
rights. The CC licenses are built on top of your copyrights, and the GPL is 
built on top of your rights over software. So far so good.

Thing is, all copyleft licenses won't interfere with existing rights. For 
example, in my jurisdiction, you can *quote* *any* copyrighted text in order 
to make a reference, or you can make a parody of *any* work. If you apply a 
CC-by-nd-nc to the work, it doesn't matter at all, because you can not assert 
any rights over people making quotes or parodies.

The same goes with the ODbL. Once you make a planet dump and let 15 years 
pass, you can not assert any rights over the dump... so you can not assert 
the ODbL. Simple as that.


Just remember: copyleft works because we have rights over stuff, but use those 
rights to let people use the works, not to prevent people from using them.


(YMMV, IANAL, you know the drill)

Cheers,
-- 
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Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivan at sanchezortega.es>

http://ivan.sanchezortega.es
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