2009/10/7 Anthony Cartmell <[email protected]>: > > Not at all, it's most useful to have different points of view :) > > The problem is where the legal line is to be drawn. It's clearly against > copyright to trace all the features of a map and publish the result. The > problem starts when you aren't tracing _all_ the features of the map, but > perhaps just one cycle route. That in itself isn't copying the map, but OS > Sales people still want you to pay them £5,000 per annum if you want to > publish that line. Whether that is legally enforceable, or reasonable, is > open to question, it seems. Then you can take it one level further, by > asking about tracing a single point from the map. Again, OS Sales want you > to buy an expensive license if you publish this point, but this must be > even less likely to be enforceable in law.
So, you can't "trace a point" on a map, you can only trace something that appears on the map. If I look at a map (such as the default google map for my area from google search) I can pinpoint where my house is. That point is not "traced" from a feature in the map, I am merely using the map to work out where the point is. If I and everyone else did so we would end up with both a database and a work that was not the original. Is it a derived work - I very much doubt it. There is no copyright in the ideas behind a work (this is well established) but only the expression of the work. I have not copied the expression. The problem in this discussion is confusing copying the map and using the map to create new information. These aren't the same things legally. I'm not at all sure that there is any legal doubt on this point and (so far) no-one has pointed me at anything that would make me sure there was, but I am happy to be corrected. Indeed *this* is very much a core area of interest for me, so any cases or legal opinions anyone wants to throw at me will be very interesting. > > Then we have the problem of the aggregation of all these traced lines and > points: if you get enough of them in one place, you do in effect end up > with a copy of significant parts of the OS mapping, and that could be seen > to break copyright :( Yes - how much do you need to copy to be infringing. In general terms, not much I suspect. Copying a small part of a book (for instance) is still an infringement (though it might be defensible), but below a certain threshold things become de minimis. > > Copyright doesn't seem to work very well as a concept on the internet with > thousands of people getting involved... Possibly. Leaving aside whether it works well as a concept at all (in my view: no) I don't think the net makes as much difference as people often assume. The law of copyright has always been rather indifferent to how things are copied, just whether they were in fact copied. Arranging to crowd source a copy doesn't create any really interesting legal problems. > > Imagine, for argument's sake, that someone organised a website that > allowed people to enter a word each from a copyrighted book, along with > its page number and its position on the page. This data goes into a nice > big database. OK. > > I would imagine that typing in a word from a copyrighted book, with some > metadata about that word (e.g. "banana, page 6, word 102"), wouldn't break > that book's copyright. So the person submitting that word isn't in trouble. That's correct, because copyright won't subsist in a single word and so copying a word (in the absence of doing anything else) does not represent an infringement. > > The person running the site isn't copying the book either, but the end > result is still potentially a copy of the book. Is there something like > "inciting to break copyright" or "facilitating the breaking of copyright"? I always wonder whether setting up a website such as this would not be "authorising" the copying of or adaptation of a work, which counts as primary infringement by virtue of s.16(2) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988: "(2) Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner does, or authorises another to do, any of the acts restricted by the copyright. " I suspect a court would get there more directly by saying that you (the website owner) are copying or adapting the work. Just because you get other people to do the dog work for you doesn't mean you aren't doing it. You can do things through the agency of others. You might want to look at sections 24 (providing means for making infringing copies) though saying you are making an "article" feels rather awkward. The threshold for copying would be a "substantial part" - a threshold you would meet sooner or later. > > Would the database that the above people have created be theirs, to do > what they like with (e.g. exporting the text of the book in the right > order)? No, because they will have created an infringing copy of the book - the fact that it is held in some odd electronic form is immaterial. They may also have a database right of their own of course. > > Yes, I agree. My old law lecturer made it very clear what "the law" is: > "the law is what the judge says it is". Until this is tested in court, we > won't ever know the answer. We need OS to take action against someone, or > someone willing to poke their head above the parapet like Ernest Marples, > but with the aim of going to court to find out the question (the answer's > almost certainly 42 ;) ) Something like that. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
