[odc-discuss] ODbL: Does publishing Produced Work from Derivative Database trigger Derivative Database ShareAlike?

Wed Mar 4 22:25:46 UTC 2009

Matt Amos wrote:
>
> if only complying with the spirit of the license were defensible in court.
>   

You'd want to talk to a lawyer of course, but I suspect it would be in 
this case; or rather, I'm not sure if the license is enforceable in 
court in the US in the first place. :)  I am less familiar with UK law 
though, and am not a lawyer.

But if the license is still being drafted, perhaps it should be clear 
that reasonably regular (weekly?) dumps are acceptable, not neccesarily 
realtime.

> in my opinion it would be of no use to provide the dumps, as i have
> added no useful information in the process of preparing my database.
> providing the processing, storage and bandwidth to create, keep and
> distribute these large dumps is a nuisance.
>   
You said that the database was constantly changing. You are adding value 
with your new content.

So the question for the licensing community is if they _intended_ to 
force you to share this new content or not.  I'm not clear on this?

Are you not wanting to share this data because you don't think you 
should have to, or just becuase it's inconvenient? If you don't think 
you should have to, and the licensing community didn't intend you to 
have to....   then I agree it's a problem to find a workable way to 
comply with the license.

If you don't think you should have, but the license community intended 
you to have to (and it's really enforceable in court), then, I guess the 
licensing community doesn't want you to use their data unless you agree 
to share the new stuff.

> there might be some provision under the "Collective Database"
> provisions, but the line between Collective and Derived seems a bit
> blurry to me.
>   
I agree entirely.

> only that a strict reading of the license would seem to imply that a
> dump of the current database would be required. which opens the door
> to effective denial of service attacks by using the resources of the
> database host entirely for dumping and hosting dumps rather than
> useful things like serving tiles.
>   
I agree that a realtime dump is unreasonable, and I suspect that the 
licensing community did not intend to require it.

Jonathan