Frederik Ramm wrote: > I've been thinking about that. It would certainly be within the > legal definition of a database to call a PNG file a database.
Not sure which legal definition you're looking at, but there's never such a thing as "certainly" where the EU Database Directive is concerned. :) The Directive says a database "should be understood to include literary, artistic, musical or other collections of works or collections of other material such as texts, sound, images, numbers, facts, and data; whereas it should cover collections of independent works, data or other materials which are systematically or methodically arranged and can be individually accessed; whereas this means that a recording or an audiovisual, cinematographic, literary or musical work as such does not fall within the scope of this Directive". The map data in a rendered PNG file cannot be individually accessed, except by means of "reverse engineering", which by its nature means "recreating a database where there isn't one". This is, of course, a spectrum, and there will doubtless be things that could be classed as either Derivative Databases or Produced Works. But that's not to say you can call anything you like a Derivative, and a PNG map seems to me to be very definitely at the Produced Work end of the spectrum. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Exception-in-Open-Data-License-Community-Guidelines-for-temporary-file-tp6504201p6530770.html Sent from the Legal Talk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk