[OSM-legal-talk] Exception in Open Data License/Community Guidelines for temporary file

[Richard Fairhurst]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I've been thinking about that. It would certainly be within the 
> legal definition of a database to call a PNG file a database.

Not sure which legal definition you're looking at, but there's never such a
thing as "certainly" where the EU Database Directive is concerned. :)

The Directive says a database "should be understood to include literary,
artistic, musical or other collections of works or collections of other
material such as texts, sound, images, numbers, facts, and data; whereas it
should cover collections of independent works, data or other materials which
are systematically or methodically arranged and can be individually
accessed; whereas this means that a recording or an audiovisual,
cinematographic, literary or musical work as such does not fall within the
scope of this Directive".

The map data in a rendered PNG file cannot be individually accessed, except
by means of "reverse engineering", which by its nature means "recreating a
database where there isn't one".

This is, of course, a spectrum, and there will doubtless be things that
could be classed as either Derivative Databases or Produced Works. But
that's not to say you can call anything you like a Derivative, and a PNG map
seems to me to be very definitely at the Produced Work end of the spectrum.

cheers
Richard



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