[OSM-legal-talk] Database and its contents

[Ed Avis]

Rob Myers <rob at ...> writes:

>>I work with databases every day and I don't understand how the 'database'
>>versus 'contents' distinction is meant to apply to maps and to OSM in
>>particular.
> 
>Imagine a database of names, song titles, photographs, recipes, poems or 
>credit card numbers.

Yes, this makes perfect sense.  What seems nonsensical is taking that and
trying to apply it to the quite different world of geodata, maps and OSM.

>What seems to throw people when we are talking about geodata in a 
>database rather than a collection of poems/photos/songs is the 
>granularity of the contents. But it doesn't really matter whether we 
>regard points, ways, uploads or any other unit as the content of the 
>database. The content of the database is any pieces of data smaller than 
>the entire database.

Anything - so a planet dump of Germany is the 'content'?  Or if that is too
much, what about a smaller extract the size of your neighbourhood?

I don't want to say that just because the boundary is fuzzy the concept must
be unworkable.  Real life and the law deal with fuzzy boundaries all the time.
But to me it seems not merely fuzzy, but nonexistent.

The thing is that an individual piece of data is entirely meaningless by
itself - whereas you can take a photograph out of Wikipedia and use just
that photo, it makes no sense to extract 'a point', 'a way' or even 'a tag'
from OSM.  The only unit that makes sense to use is a partial extract of
the whole thing - complete with ways, points and tags - which then is clearly
a 'database' and not mere 'contents'.  Or if it is 'contents' then equally the
entirety of OSM taken as a whole must be considered 'contents'.

If we wanted to, we could produce an explanatory text which would accompany
the licence terms and explain with examples what the OSM project considers to
be its database and what we think of as contents.  But that doesn't mean the
distinction exists in law or would be understood by a court.  It would just be
on the level of social convention and a request for people to follow the
spirit of the licence as well as the letter.  Which is fine - I'm all in favour
of that - but it makes all the elaborate legal gymnastics seem a bit pointless.

>Any complexity in this is a product of the law not the licence...

I don't think it is a case of the law being complex, but rather of trying to
invent new constructs that don't correspond to the law at all, or indeed to
common sense.  (The example of a collection of recordings or photographs is
fine, but that's not what we are dealing with.)  That is why things become
foggy.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>