On 4 November 2012 21:21, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > A license is, by definition, a grant of permission to do something. If you > don't accept the license, then your rights are limited to the exceptions to > database right / copyright which are granted by law.
Yes, but if you're told you can use something under license X, you could reasonably have the expectation that there wouldn't be any additional restrictions on what you can do. Anyway, if I've understand what you're saying correctly, the situation is roughly this: 1/ Users are free to license the copyright in any Produced Works from an ODbL database to others under any license they wish, provided that the license: (a) Is compatible with whatever content license the ODbL database uses for the contents that went in to making the Produced Work. (b) Ensures that the ODbL attribution text remains on any re-uses of the work (in order to comply with a conservative reading of ODbL 4.3). (And obviously that the user must also comply with the other terms of the ODbL regarding attribution and making available any derivative databases / added data / transformation algorithms.) 2/ However, any database rights in the Produced Work cannot be so licensed, and the ODbL still applies to them. So anyone else publicly using the Produced Work or any derivatives thereof needs to be bound by the ODbL. In particular, they must comply with 4.3 and 4.6 if they publicly use a Produced Work. Given point 2, I think it is (at a minimum) rather misleading for someone to simply state that a Produced Work can be re-used under a copyright license such as CC-By. A reasonable person might assume that as long as they comply with the CC-By terms, they can then do what they want with the Produced Work. But there are additional restrictions imposed by the database rights in point 2, which might not be expected. (In fact, it could be argued that the receiver of the produced work would need to formally agree to the ODbL before they could use the produced work themselves, so does that mean that the person offering the produced work needs to include this as a term / requirement in whatever license they offer the Produced work under?). I've seen the argument before (in the context of preventing people from reverse engineering the data in produced works) that this issue is equivalent to a photograph under CC-By, where the recipient can re-use the photograph under CC-By, but doesn't rights get to use any IP in the objects in the photograph. Whilst this is the same problem of additional restrictions, the distinction between rights to use the image and rights over the subject matter of the image is much clearer (and much more likely to be understood by the average person) for a photograph of a real-life object, than it is for (say) a map tile. The former is clearly a photograph of an object, and the artistry of the photograph is separate from the IP in the object. It's much less obvious that the map tile needs to be thought of as an image of some data from a database, where the artistry in the image is separate form the IP in the underlying data. Assuming this interpretation is roughly correct, I think it would be useful if something explaining my points 1 and 2 could be added to the license FAQ at http://opendatacommons.org/faq/licenses/ to help other ODbL users and those wanting to re-use Produced Works understand what they can and can't do. Best wishes, Robert. _______________________________________________ odc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/odc-discuss
