[OSM-legal-talk] 'Contents'

[Ed Avis]

Francis Davey <fjmd1a at ...> writes:

>The ODbL definition of "database" implicitly contains a definition of
>"contents", namely the things that are arranged in a systematic etc
>way. What the "contents" are will depend on the terms of OSMF's
>licence,

I think the 'contents' must depend on the nature of the work being considered
and not on the licence.  For some works, such as a database of photographs, it
is clear what is the 'contents' and what the database which contains them.
I don't think that distinction is clear for the OSM map data, because the
individual data items (such as latitude numbers, or names of things) are almost
meaningless considered separately.

So my question is really about how the law and the licence text apply to OSM
in particular.  The ODbL is a general-purpose licence for anything that may
be considered a 'database' having 'contents'; the question is whether a given
work can be considered in that framework.  For a photo album, the answer is yes;
for an individual photo, surely not (it would be stretching things to consider
each square pixel as a separate item of 'contents').  The OSM map falls
somewhere between these two extremes.

The example you gave was that of the user diaries table, which contains prose
written by OSM contributors.  It would certainly be a good example of a split
between database and contents.  However, it's not in fact part of the map data
which is proposed to be distributed under ODbL / DbCL.

>So, in the UK an entire table (and certainly the entire database),
>considered as a table, would attract database right and one or two
>forms of copyright (probably only the one, maybe none), but some of
>the data in the database might attract its own copyright. That
>copyright would not be licensed under ODbL which expressly does not
>deal with the licence terms of the "contents" of the database.

This does make sense, but it makes it important to find out exactly what these
'contents' are.  The ODbL text is no help because it is general-purpose and
doesn't know about map-specific terms or OSM-specific data such as nodes and
areas.

>Problem: what if I take a map and enter points on it into the OSM
>database? [...]  However the map is not (as a map) "contents" of the
>database (in ODbL terms) because it is not "individually accessible".

Ah, so perhaps this is the test; if an object can be taken out individually
then it is considered 'contents'.  However, this is problematic; given the
file of map data, whether something is individually accessible depends entirely
on the computer program used to manipulate the file.  At the extreme a whole
city might be individually accessible through some interface.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>