The Open Database Licence (ODbL) is a licence agreement intended to allow you to freely share, modify, and use this Database while maintaining this same freedom for others. Many databases are covered by copyright, and therefore this document licenses these rights. Some jurisdictions, mainly in Europe, have specific rights that cover databases, and so the ODbL addresses these rights, too. Finally, the ODbL is also an agreement in contract for you to act in certain ways in return for accessing this Database. Also -- if you'd like to discuss or keep up to date with the Open Data Commons project, you can join the mailing list . Related posts: Biblios -- "world's largest database" of open bibliographic data goes beta! Biblios.net, "the world's largest database of freely-licensed library records", is now beta-testing. From their website: _biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source _biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, _biblios.net includes... Open Database License Jordan Hatcher (Open Content Lawyer) and Dr. Charlotte Waelde (University of Edinburgh) have just published the first draft of the Open Data Commons, or the Open Database License. The new license was inspired by the Talis Community License (a draft... A Sighting of the Database Right Given my interest in metadata for cultural works when I cam across a copy of Who Wrote What?: A Dictionary of Writers and Their Works (ed. Michael Cox) [OUP 2001] in a secondhand bookshop I was immediately interested. After a... 0