[OSM-legal-talk] ODbL and publishing source data

[Jonathan Harley]

On 01/12/11 00:33, James Livingston wrote:
>
> On 1 December 2011 00:18, Jonathan Harley <jon at spiffymap.net 
> <mailto:jon at spiffymap.net>> wrote:
>
>     By way of analogy: suppose I sent you a private email which
>     included a license saying if you publicly use my email, you must
>     share with me any other emails you combine it with. My email sits
>     in your inbox together with other emails, and you can do searches
>     across all of them. If it's a unix system, they're probably all in
>     one single file. But have you really "combined" my email with your
>     other private emails? My email is sitting there unmodified and
>     completely independent of all your other private emails; it is not
>     itself combined with them. So no, "storing next to" is not
>     "combining". You can safely share a screenshot of your mail
>     program without having to send me all your other private emails.
>
>
> The problem with analogies is that they are analogies and aren't the 
> same as the original thing. As a similar one, what if instead you sent 
> me your mailbox rather than a single email, and I imported all your 
> mail into mine (so are probably stored in the same file). Although 
> none of the actual data (emails) have changes, they are stored 
> together (possible even in a SQL database rather than flat files).
>
> I don't know if that would count as two collective databases or a 
> single derived database.

As long as you can still tell which emails came from my mailbox, then 
definitely collective. Being stored together does not form a derivative 
database.

(I think we may have some terminology confusion here: in IT we tend to 
think of a database as "all the data that can be accessed through this 
software" - but when lawyers say database they really mean dataset, and 
how it is stored and retrieved isn't relevant.)

If your mail software threw away some of the header information in my 
emails (specifically the envelope-to field) so that you could no longer 
separately search my emails and your emails if you wanted to, that would 
probably be a derivative database.

>
>     If the rendering of the second output depends on the first
>     dataset, the Produced Work created from the second dataset is not
>     independent of of the first dataset.
>
>
>     No, the produced work isn't independent of it, but the datasets
>     are still independent of each other, that's my point.
>
>
> My point is that to actually do the rendering, you will have created a 
> single database containing both datasets in the process (albeit 
> possible as transient in-memory data structures). I don't think we're 
> really disagreeing, just both unsure as to where the line is and 
> guessing on different sides :)
>

I think we may be just making different assumptions about what rendering 
involves? I was thinking of a simplistic renderer that would simply 
examine each map feature independently and decide whether/how to render 
it based on what had already been rendered (for example onto a tile), 
but you're right, another way would be to build an in-memory structure 
representing parts of both and then do something with the combination.

I don't really think that in-memory data structures count as databases, 
though. The ODbL says "using this Database... to create a Produced Work 
does not create a Derivative Database". I would have thought that the 
software doing its work would count as "use" for this purpose.

It seems to me that this would be something a future version of ODbL 
could be clearer on, though.


Jonathan.

-- 
Jonathan Harley    :     Managing Director     :     SpiffyMap Ltd

Email: md at spiffymap.com   Phone: 0845 313 8457   www.spiffymap.com
Post: The Venture Centre, Sir William Lyons Road, Coventry CV4 7EZ