On 7 July 2011 21:42, Peter B. Hirtle <[email protected]> wrote: > Rufus, the content found in the database is on a particular lake, and consist > of biological and chemical parameters (counts of zooplankton, phytoplankton, > fish, other organisms, chemical analyses of water, etc.). It takes effort to > collect this content, and the faculty member who generates it wants > attribution. > > We know that the there is no copyright in the content: it is all factual. > And we know that the ODC-BY license won't work, since it is explicit that its > terms do not apply to the contents of the database, but only to the database > itself. We are assuming that most users will not want to replicate the > entire database, but will instead want to extract content from the database. > For example, a 3rd party user might only be interested in the chemical > analyses of the water and have no interest in the biological content in the > database. The only ODC content license that I can find (even though it is > not listed as a license) is the Database Content License, and it does not > allow for Attribution as a condition.
OK, I think there is a bit of confusion here over 'database'. You don't have to exactly the whole database for the ODC licenses to apply to you -- after in all with most databases people only use some portion of that database. The licenses specifically talk of: "Extraction and Re-utilisation of the whole or a Substantial part of the Contents;" (ODbL 3.1(a)) Thus the ODC licenses will cover situations where people are only using some portion of a database. Just using the chemical analyses would likely be an example of using a "Substantial" part of the "Contents" > If we are going to stipulate that a database is different than its content > (which I think makes sense), don't you then need to have a full panoply of > data content licenses that are based on contract rather than copyright? Or > is it ODC's position that all data must be completely, utterly, and only > public domain? If that is the case, we will have to write our own agreement > compatible with the researcher's desires to address how third parties can use > the content he has created. See my comments above, but in essence: using a subset of a database still counts as using/reusing that database under the ODC licenses (of course this will depend on how much is taken but this is true with all of this: in copyright the amount that is reused from another work will determine whether one is infringing or not ...) Rufus _______________________________________________ odc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss
