On 11 February 2010 14:19, David Murn <[email protected]> wrote: > Doesnt all content have an identifiable author, or at least copyright > holder? Unless its computer generated that is.
The copyright holder isn't always the author, although in the case of Channel 9/Telstra they should have auditing systems in place to be able to identify the authors, but again they wouldn't be the copyright holder. Although if they couldn't identify the employees who updated what I guess they don't. In any case I never mentioned anything about this point. > So how is this 'meta information' any different to 'fact'? The meta > information might say a road has an incline or a service station sells > e10, but just because that is entered in by OSM users, it doesnt change > it from being fact to being a creative work. The creative aspect comes from deciding what tags to use, and mapping slightly differently from the next person, as I said before the facts/vector data probably isn't protected, but the meta data requires some thought/creativity to figure out how to tag things, especially non-common things. > Does this mean we'll likely be seeing many more mass imports from > people, now that the legal issues are fuzzy? Doesnt this go against the > whole principle of OSM, being that its completely free of any possible > restrictions? Unlikely, the white/yellow pages in the US and other jurisdictions haven't had copyright on them for some time, that is only half the problem the next problem is getting access to suitable sources of data and to do so you may be under contract rather than relying on copyright laws to protect the information. Take for example the national toilet database: http://data.australia.gov.au/610 To download it you need to agree to a shrink wrap license that states some very controdicting things: Permitted Purpose means the right to: 1. (a) use, adapt, reproduce, publish and communicate to the public the Database in any format (including any part of the Database); and 2. (b) design and build, or have designed and built on your behalf, any Derivative Products. 3.2 You may not sublicense your rights under these Terms to any person. If you require another person to access the Database for the Permitted Purpose (including a person you engage to design or build a Derivative Product on your behalf), that person must obtain a copy of the Database from the data.australia.gov.au website and comply with the Terms of this licence. 7.1 You must ensure that if and when you make any Derivative Product available to third parties that you do so on terms that ensure users they understand that we do not guarantee, and accept no risk in respect of, the accuracy, currency or completeness of the Derivative Product. Does that mean we can create a derived data set for OSM and then import it? _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
