I would like to se the whole database viewed public, maybee a "copyleft" approach. As this is the only way to stay put of spending extra resources on non-productive work. Fully agreed. Any copyright on the database would have a highly counterproductive effect since it might well stop people from contributing info for it.

My 2 cent: Within germany the database holding information on routing, network and people information is currently not copyrighted, but kept confidential only for network administrators, because just a few people voted that the X.121 addresses of their routers should be confidential. I really don't like this personally, just being used to the openly availably information about network configuration in the us and europe. So in my opinion: don't make it copyrighted, don't make it confidential. If there is any need for confidential or copyrighted kind of data, try to keep it to a minimum and separate it from the other data, so that it don't suck up the whole database into confidential or copyrighted state (like in germany). Of course any attempts whatsoever to introduce copyright or confidential information will possibly introduce additional work for the involved people (we had to set up special non anonymous ftp access for our database for example). Toerless