Rob Myers <r...@...> writes: >>I work with databases every day and I don't understand how the 'database' >>versus 'contents' distinction is meant to apply to maps and to OSM in >>particular. > >Imagine a database of names, song titles, photographs, recipes, poems or >credit card numbers.
Yes, this makes perfect sense. What seems nonsensical is taking that and trying to apply it to the quite different world of geodata, maps and OSM. >What seems to throw people when we are talking about geodata in a >database rather than a collection of poems/photos/songs is the >granularity of the contents. But it doesn't really matter whether we >regard points, ways, uploads or any other unit as the content of the >database. The content of the database is any pieces of data smaller than >the entire database. Anything - so a planet dump of Germany is the 'content'? Or if that is too much, what about a smaller extract the size of your neighbourhood? I don't want to say that just because the boundary is fuzzy the concept must be unworkable. Real life and the law deal with fuzzy boundaries all the time. But to me it seems not merely fuzzy, but nonexistent. The thing is that an individual piece of data is entirely meaningless by itself - whereas you can take a photograph out of Wikipedia and use just that photo, it makes no sense to extract 'a point', 'a way' or even 'a tag' from OSM. The only unit that makes sense to use is a partial extract of the whole thing - complete with ways, points and tags - which then is clearly a 'database' and not mere 'contents'. Or if it is 'contents' then equally the entirety of OSM taken as a whole must be considered 'contents'. If we wanted to, we could produce an explanatory text which would accompany the licence terms and explain with examples what the OSM project considers to be its database and what we think of as contents. But that doesn't mean the distinction exists in law or would be understood by a court. It would just be on the level of social convention and a request for people to follow the spirit of the licence as well as the letter. Which is fine - I'm all in favour of that - but it makes all the elaborate legal gymnastics seem a bit pointless. >Any complexity in this is a product of the law not the licence... I don't think it is a case of the law being complex, but rather of trying to invent new constructs that don't correspond to the law at all, or indeed to common sense. (The example of a collection of recordings or photographs is fine, but that's not what we are dealing with.) That is why things become foggy. -- Ed Avis <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
