I would like to collect some information about copyright and licensing issues for databases. The intent is to build large stores of data, such as music discography. Such databases would not necessarily be centralized, but should be inter- operable. For example, someone could extract the relevant discography for celtic music and build up that database; someone else might then want to merge the celtic music database into a more general world music database; someone else could try to pull everything back together again.
Some of the issues here include: * What data is or is not copyrightable? Does this vary by jurisdiction? How to deal with a database which contains a mix of copyrightable and noncopyrightable data? * Same for database schemas and APIs. (The software layers above this are, I think, well understood.) * Are there any well understood rules that determine when a database is considered a derived work from another database? (IOW, is there a legal basis for enforcing a copyleft license?) * Are there any political issues that may influence a choice of license? (E.g., I seem to recall lobbying efforts to give private database owners special IP protections.) * Are there existing licenses that have been applied to databases? What is the experience with such licenses? This question comes up regarding the MusicBrainz project, which originally used the Open Content License, and is now considering changing its licensing. -- /* * Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/ */ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3