Another set of questions, this time on the FSF-Europe list
I’m slightly concerned about the triple-whammy of database licensing, copyright licensing and a contract.
The reason why database rights and copyright are in the same licence is because they overlap in some cases (in Europe anyway), and so in order to clear both you need a single licence. In many jurisdictions — mostly the civil law jurisdictions — licences are contracts anyway, so that part shouldn’t be a surprise.
There’s also an Open Data Factual Info Licence which puzzles me a bit because *information* is not covered by copyright, only the expression (the licence also seems to state this in point 2.4), so it seems a bit unnecessary.
The Open Data Factual info licence is to cover two areas:
1) Some jurisdictions have a very low threshold of originality for copyright
known as the ’sweat of the brow’ test. If it took a lot of work to create, then
you can have a copyright. This is the rationale in the Telstra decision, for
example, in Australia which held that you could have copyright over a telephone
directory (an alpha order collection of factual information: names and numbers).
This licence covers any copyright argument in these jurisdictions while still
stating that the licensor takes the position of not overstating his or her own
copyright in other jurisdictions (”facts are free”).
2) You could actually have information in a set of factual data that could
have copyright. What if you had a bunch of geodata that had no copyright (or
some copyright argument in Australia), but in the dataset you also have some
images or other information (’works’) that do have copyright. You want to
license both the factual information and any other copyrighted info, so you can
use this licence for the whole thing
Thanks again for the comments.
