[OSM-legal-talk] legal FAQ license

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 13 October 2010 22:50, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Our new license does have a provision that allows using non-substantial
> extracts without regard to the license. This can be viewed as similar to
> what I described above, although there is a big difference. If one million
> users each make a non-copyrightable contribution to OSM under CC-BY-SA then
> I can take those one million contributions and use them in any way I want
> because if they are not copyrightable then CC-BY-SA doesn't have any effect.
> However if I put those same one million contributions into a database
> protected by ODbL, then they are likely to form a "substantial" extract and
> thus they cannot be extracted outside of ODbL terms. (On the other hand, it
> is well possible that there is an individual contribution which is
> copyrightable but still doesn't form a "substantial" extract.)

You may also want to take into account the automatic database rights
in some users' contributions (even if not copyrightable), which iirc
are not disclaimed by CC-By-SA 2 unported.

>
> ODbL's concept "if you take a lot of insubstantial extracts and combine them
> then they again form a substantial extract" does not apply to copyright of
> individual contributions made under CC-BY-SA - if you take lots of
> non-copyrighted bits submitted by various users and combine them then they
> don't suddenly become copyrighted - or maybe they do, but then it's your
> copyright and not that of the original contributors (think of tearing a
> magazine to shreds and then gluing together a nice picture from the coloured
> pieces of paper).

Agreed.

Cheers