Looking for OS Licence for DB Dump

[David Dillard]

You sure about that with regard to U.S. law?

Databases as Compilations: Databases are generally protected by copyright law as compilations. Under the Copyright Act, a compilation is defined as a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 17. U.S.C. § 101. The preexisting materials or data may be protected by copyright, or may be unprotectable facts or ideas (see the BitLaw discussion on unprotected ideas for more information).


http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at ccil.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 10:51 AM
To: David Dillard
Cc: awiesmann at somap.org; license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: Looking for OS Licence for DB Dump

David Dillard scripsit:

> For content, you probably should look at the various Creative Commons 
> licenses.  See http://creativecommons.org/.

In addition, the Academic Free License and its copyleft twin the Open Software License are designed to be equally usable for source code and data.

> In particular, you might want to check out the Databases and Creative 
> Commons FAQ: http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases.html

An important takeaway from this FAQ is that in the U.S., the content of most databases is not copyrightable (because they represent facts with no creative input), whereas in most EU countries there is a _sui generis_ database right, and in most Commonwealth countries the copyright laws are extended to factual collections.

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