[Aust-NZ] ODBL and real life...

[John Smith]

For the longest time it was claimed ODBL would better protect data
than CC-by-SA in some jurisdictions, with the US being one of those.

However the opposite seems true, since the above claim was based on
the premise that creating maps wasn't a creative enterprise.

The ODBL doesn't place a limit on what license produced works can be
licensed as, they can be published as PD/CC0.

In any case unless the copyright license contains no derivative
clauses people are then able to derive data from produced works and
that derived data can be used to build a vectorised database.

There is one clause here where countries with database rights, when
the data re-enters those countries the database right might re-apply,
but this doesn't apply for countries like the US (or Australia for
that matter).

Although I'm told that the above section of Database Directive in EU
is untested in court, and I think some CC licenses already waive
database rights and going into the future I believe creative commons
plan to include this in more licenses.

One more point for those that might claim this would be difficult to
do large scale, SVG files like the ones osm.org publishes are produced
works, even though they aren't raster images, so converting to SVG and
then back to map data would potentially be pretty trivial.

In other words CC-by-SA protects data better than ODBL, which is the
complete opposite that we keep getting told.

The reason CC-by-SA will protect map data is copyright laws cover maps
and the creative effort that goes into making them, it doesn't care
how the map is stored, so while database protections are usually
tricky this isn't the case when it comes to maps.