On 06/02/2013 11:31, Javier Ruiz wrote:
A completely unrelated aside
I bought a copy of the part-PAF (that's just the street-level listing,
rather than individual addresses) once, as part of a project I was
working on. I didn't intend to use the data it contained directly (as
that would have been a breach of the licence terms), but I wanted to see
the data structure and also see if I could reverse engineer it from
genuinely open data (since it broadly overlaps with the OS Locator
database, which is OGL).
You have to be careful with using databases to recreate them elsewhere.
We had a similar question in the realm of genealogy, about downloading
commercial databases from places such as Ancestry.com just to check for
completeness and data structures, and our legal people advised caution.
Good job it turned out to be so useless that I gave up on that approach,
then!
http://www.out-law.com/page-5698
Also, at the time of writing, ECJ guidance has been sought by the German
courts in respect of the concept of "extraction". The opinion of the
Advocate General (AG), which is often (but not always) followed by the
ECJ, is that "extraction" should be given a broad interpretation. The
AG thought that extraction (which is defined as transferring all or the
substantial part of the contents of a database to another medium) should
not be limited to the physical copying of data, but should extend to
situation where someone had consulted a database and then reproduced its
contents elsewhere. The ECJ's ruling is therefore awaited with interest.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that would only apply where the structure of
the database is such that it could not reasonably be inferred simply
from its function. Postal addresses have a known format, you could
create a postal address database which is identical in function, and
nearly identical in content, to the PAF without ever seeing a copy of
the PAF itself. But you couldn't do the same with, say, a BMD database
as the structure isn't at all obvious without actually seeing how it's
constructed.
Mark
--
http://mark.goodge.co.uk
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