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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> The Directive says a database 

[snip Richard's quote and replace mine from 
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31996L0009:EN:HTML]

"Article 1

Scope

1. This Directive concerns the legal protection of databases in any form.

2. For the purposes of this Directive, 'database` shall mean a 
collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a 
systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic 
or other means."

I would say that a list of 65536 colour values (the "data"), arranged in 
a systematic way in 256 columns and 256 rows, and individually 
accessible by a PNG reader, certainly sounds like a database according 
to this defintion?

I'm just speculating here but if I had a rendering engine that would 
transform the OSM planet file into a giant bitmap (colour values 
arranged, etc.), I would not be surprised if I could get away with 
sharing this bitmap as a derived database under ODbL. I guess someone 
who printed it out would then create a produced work, but me?

Not a lawyer here either, and frankly if we took the position that every 
map tile was indeed a database, then a lot of the advantages we see in 
ODbL would crumble. But, as Kai suggested, in some situations it may 
actually make things easier for you if you could say "this PNG file is a 
database"; and the current community norm does seem to allow a lot of 
interpretation. Ok, so my PNG file was "intended" to extract the data. 
It didn't work out in the end but the intention was there... )

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"