On Jan 6, 2008 12:26 PM, John McKerrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just thought I'd mention: > > >>> 3) You remember a business' name and look it up in the phone > >>> book, there > >>> you find the street name. > > Phone book could be considered a copyrighted database, as would the > online equivalents...
In the US, the contents of the white pages in a phone book are not copyrightable as determined in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service [1]. Information such as that in phone books may be copyrightable material in other countries; some countries have case law on this issue [2], some don't. Whether the contents of a phone book are copyrightable is not really relevant to this discussion, though, because a street name alone is not copyrightable (it is too short) even though a phone book (a large collection of street names and numbers) might be in some countries. Denver 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service#Other_countries _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list newbies@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
