Open Data License/Produced Work - Guideline

From OpenStreetMap Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search


When is my project a Produced Work?

Background

The ODbL license has a concept called "Produced Work" - a work (such as an image, audiovisual material, text, or sounds) resulting from using the whole or a Substantial part of the Contents (via a search or other query) from this Database, a Derivative Database, or this Database as part of a Collective Database.

The basic idea means that you can release your map under any license that you like and also add other separate distinct layers to your map from sources with incompatible licensing terms.

Assigning the result of your project to one or the other is usually but not always obvious, so what do you do about the non-obvious cases? This guideline is intended to help you decide whether is a "Produced Work" and when it is Derived Database and must published only under ODbL.

The guideline and examples

Status: endorsed by the OSMF board 2014-06-06. Read the formal guideline.

Open issues, use cases, discussion

Any text here is not part of the formal or proposed guideline! If there is anything you are unsure about, put it here and it can be discussed.

Garmin maps (.img files). They are vector database files all right but they are not really made “for the extraction of the original data”, or are they?

Garmin .img file maps or similar vector files for mobile devices are an interesting case as the internal structure is a vector database.

  • In normal cases they are distributed with the primary intention of providing a visual map to end users, therefore it is a Produced Work.
  • If distributed for other reasons, or if someone then extracted data from it with the intention of using it as a database, then it would become a Derived Work.