[odc-discuss] ODbL RC1 and the reverse engineering clause (RFC)

Tue May 19 10:08:16 UTC 2009

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Jordan S Hatcher <
jordan at opencontentlawyer.com> wrote:

> Thanks Ulf for the comments.
>
> On 18 May 2009, at 20:01, Ulf Möller wrote:
>
> > Jordan S Hatcher schrieb:
> >> To give a concrete example of the situation, this is where you make
> >> a  map from geodata. The map is a "Produced Work" and the geodata
> >> is from  an ODbL licensed database.   I see this data layer in the
> >> produced  work as not something covered by the copyright layer in
> >> the produced  work, which could be, for example CC-BY-SA licensed.
> >>
> > Arguably it is a different layer, but it is still a license
> > restriction based on intellectual property claims.
> >
> > Several open content projects only accept content released under
> > certain well-known licenses and do not allow additional restrictions
> > on the license. OpenStreetMap would have to go to all those projects
> > (including Wikimedia Commons, the various language editions of
> > Wikipedia, and a lot of projects that we may not even know about)
> > and find out if they agree with your interpretation.
>
> I don't see why. Saying you can't recreate an ODbL database with
> something (the factual information) that isn't being licensed in the
> CC-BY-SA license isn't an "additional restriction" to the CC-BY-SA
> license. We're not talking about incorporating the ODbL database into
> a Produced Work (leaving aside the discussion about derivative
> databases) and thus having a Produced Work with an ODbL Database
> inside of it.
>

It may help to focus on this problem by considering the case of a vector map
format such as SVG.  An SVG map looks just like any other map except that it
is defined not by the colour of each individual pixel but by instructions
such as draw a church symbol at coordinates x,y.  To a user an image map and
a vector map may be indistinguishable, and they would both be considered to
be Produced Works.  However, vector maps do have information from the
database inside them and it can be extracted with no loss of fidelity.

80n
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