First off all let me state that 1) I am all in favour of resolving the licensing issue (see my comments to this list on 1 / 3/ 2007 for example) 2) I'm glad that at last the issue is being addressed
Secondly I am of the opinion that if in moving to a new licence we lose some contributors and their data then that might have to be the price of resolving the issues. However having got the above out of the way, I am concerned about the current wording of the ODbl license, not just from the perspective of my contributions to OSM data, but more importantly from the perspective of OSM. My current concerns are very specific, and hopefully may simply be down to my misreading of the licence, but: Section 2.2(a) states "The copyright licensed includes any individual elements of the Database, but does not cover the copyright over the Data independent of this Database." The copyrighting of the data is covered by Section 2.2(b) and here states "Database Rights only extend to the Extraction and Re-utilisation of the whole or a Substantial part of the Data". I have real problems with the use of the word "Substantial ". From my interoperation it would appear that extraction and subsequent use of any amount of data which is deemed to be "insubstantial" is effectively free of any copyright or database rights. Currently the compressed planet file is 5.1Gb, and for instance the compressed extracts for Germany's data is 368Mb, and for the UK 115Mb. So the UK data represents 2.25% of the data, and Germany's data represents 7.2% of the data. I would have thought it would be hard to argue that 2.25% is "substantial", so if the ODbl was adopted would be effectively be allowing the extraction of the whole of the UK data to occur free of any copyright? David _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
