Another comment on FSF Europe, this time about intent and purpose of the Open Data Commons Factual Information Licence. This continues on from a previous post on opencontentlawyer:
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.
I think the idea is that the factual info license covers the database asa whole, contents and all. The ODL (the Open Data Commons Database Licence) itself seeks to only cover the database rights: the collection of contents and the ordering/indexes/etc.
As an example, if you had a database of books which contained the texts of the books themselves, if those books were in copyright you’d have to use the ODL because you can’t license the copyright of the books. If they were Gutenberg books, you could use the ODFIL because you can license the job lot. (Ignoring the obvious issue in the first case where you probably don’t have the rights to redistribute the database anyway
To clarify, the purpose of the Factual Information Licence is to provide a blanket licence for factual data collected into a database. It is meant to work with the Database licence, so that if you have a database of factual data, you would use both licences. The ODC-FIL doesn’t cover database rights, and so would not be preferable to use for an entire database.
More on this issue is addressed in a previous post. The idea is that the FIL covers a homogenous set of factual data as a sort of belt and suspenders approach to making sure that all copyright over the data and the database is covered. The idea is that you can apply whatever licence to the contents of the database that is needed, either for the whole or for the each individual entry.
You could use the Factual Info licence on more than just factual information, provided that you want a non-copyleft (no share alike requirement) open/free/libre licence for the material. For a comparison to software, see the BSD or MIT licences.
