On 28/02/2009, at 3:38 PM, Jim Croft wrote: > Putting words into their mouths, I think the argument would be that > the decision-making involved in selection, storage, management and > display of these fact is indeed a creative act, even though the facts > themselves aren't. A blank screen magically comes alive - a map with > dots, lines, symbols, colours and most importantly, communicated > meaning. Sure smells like creativity to me... > > I wonder if the Renaissance cartographers, or any cartographers for > that matter, would regard their work as not creative? A well rendered > informative and accurate map is a beautiful thing. They don't just > happen; someone must have created them.
I definitely agree with that - as an interpretation of the underlying data, they are a creative work and so copyright-able. I'm not a lawyer (which is a good thing, because all this legal stuff makes my head hurt), but I think the main issue is whether the collection data that underlies the map is copyright-able. I've been reading up on it a bit recently (trying to understand the ODbL) but obviously don't have the deep knowledge a copyright lawyer will. Copying someone's beautifully drawn map of Sydney is obviously not allowed. However the location of the Sydney Opera House is a fact and so not copyrightable, and the location and name of Paramatta Road, and so on. While I can't copy the map as-is, can I create my own map getting the location and name of everything from the original map? Some countries (including Australia, I think) have something calls a "database right" which means that a collection of facts can be copyright-able even though individually they can't. The usual example where this is used (and I believe what the first Australian court case related to this is about) is phone books. The fact that person X lives at a certain address and has a certain phone number is an un- copyrightable fact, but are you allowed to produce a copy of the phone book? Back to OSM, what we have is pretty much just a collection of geospatial facts (locations, names, etc). In countries that don't have a database copyright, what stops someone from just copying the whole database? As I understand it, that is the kind of thing ODbL is meant to prevent, in addition to some other quirks of having a Creative Commons licence used for something that isn't really creative. I'm not certain whether any of that is actually correct, but it's what I've managed to gather from reading some discussions on it. James _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
