[OSM-legal-talk] Database and its contents

80n 80n80n at gmail.com
Tue Nov 23 11:33:26 GMT 2010


On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Indeed, using something that is so novel and untested as ODbL to license
OSM's work is foolish.  Especially given that copyright as applied to maps
is well established and have been in use for a couple of hundred years.
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