[OSM-legal-talk] Request for comments on new ODbL Community Guideline

[Mike Collinson]

The License Working Group is working on some new Community Guidelines <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Community_Guidelines>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Data_License/Community_Guidelines, and we would very much appreciate input and guidance on what anyone from the contributor community thinks to be practical and acceptable.

The ODbL relies on language from the EU Database Directive, which isn't perfectly clear about when a database is derivative and when it isn't. This is because the laws are relatively new and untested in court. Therefore it is important that we can provide guidelines about what is considered to be derivative and what isn't. There will, of course, be some grey areas. 

We've come up with three areas as follows.  These are "strawmen",  so please feel free to hack and attack.  Everything is up for discussion, including the terminology and whether we are even asking the right questions.

- Trivial Transformations - If you make changes to the format of OpenStreetMap data without adding new physical observations, at what point is Share Alike triggered?

- Metadata layers - You have made a distinct series of metadata observations (e.g., the ages of churches) or a set of creative works (e.g. restaurant reviews). You keep them in a separate database, but you use OSM data, such as node id, lat/lon, to make maps to show location.  Do you have a Collective Database (no share alike) or a Derivative Database (Share Alike of the metadata layer can be triggered)?

- Indexing - If you are simply indexing OpenStreetMap database, should Share Alike be triggered? What about Search Engines?

Mike 
License Working Group 
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