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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Would assets built upon the exported XML be considered an "adapted database" in the license terms?

The decision for the OSM license switch was a questionable one. If you're in the US, the (federal) copyright statutes contain no sui generis provisions for databases. I.e., there is effectively on copyright protection for the kinds of things you'll be pulling from OSM, so long as you can guarantee that the data you're pulling is limited to the attributes that wouldn't meet the threshold for creativity. This includes all the boring but most useful stuff: coordinates, dimensions, building height, street layout.

This is not legal advice.

The Open Database Licence (as used by OSM) is expressly a contract as well as a copyright and database rights licence, so it applies in the US even when copyright doesn't. (I'm choosing not to pronounce here on whether applying copyleft/share-alike to geodata is a good idea...)

IANAL, but seems doubtful that they can enforce that contract; some servers (that the OSM project links to) don't even mention it when you download the files, let alone require an explicit mark of your agreement.

Copyright is different, in the sense that in the absence of a license, the default terms in the law actually prohibit one from copying stuff, hence one can't claim ignorance.

Enforceability of clickwrap is a long-disputed topic. But I think it's fair to say that anyone who intentionally disrespects the wishes of the volunteers who are providing them with the best source of free geodata in the world is a first-rate idiot.

That is useful in the US, but in Europe boring but useful databases are still covered by copyright.

I presume you mean "Derived Database", which has a share alike (and attribution) requirement in the OSM licence. The other possibility is a "Produced Work" which only has an attribution requirement. Notably a map image generated from OSM data is widely held to be a "produced work". If the result of this is "database-y" then it's probably a "derived database". If it's "image-y", it could be a produced work.

ODC uses adapted to describe derivatives in their "human-readable summary".

http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/

What form of definition of "database" are used, ie how do we differential between an "adaptation" and an "adapted database".

For example, would a texture used in a game that has a environment grid generated from the osm database be considered an adaptation of the osm database? I personally don't think so, on the concept that the concept of databases has conceptual borders which generally don't include textures.

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