[OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

Thu Aug 21 16:42:39 UTC 2014

The page asserts:

"Geocodes are a Produced Work by the definition of the ODbL (section 1.):
“Produced Work” – a work (such as an image, audiovisual material,
text, or sounds) resulting from using the whole or a Substantial part
of the Contents (via a search or other query) from this Database, a
Derivative Database, or this Database as part of a Collective Database."

The rest of the page then silently slips from the idea that individual
"geocodes" (a term of art for co-ordinates Extracted from the
Database) are Produced Works (rather than individually not being
Substantial Extracts) to the idea that any number of "geocodes" are
still a Produced Work.

But neither the ODbL nor the page explain why a database of
geographical co-ordinates is more like an image, text or sound rather
than...a database. Or why if that database contains a Substantial
portion of the source Database it is not a Derivative Database.

The biggest blank on the page is therefore any explanation of why a
derivative database becomes a produced work if we call the queries
used to produce it "geocoding" rather than Extraction. :-/