On 15 September 2013 11:27, ael <[email protected]> wrote: > > It is a few years since I looked at any of this, but it had not occurred > to me that any copyright issue could arise. They are essentially modern > trig points. There is a mark on the ground, and their website publishes > the coordinates. Using these coordinates to position a node on osm > would constitute republishing? I thought very small extracts of > copyrighted material were permitted in any case.
It is the standard copyright issue for maps. There is a relatively new sort of copyright called database rights. Normally for copyright you need to have some creative input. Things like addresses and telephone numbers do not have any creative input. However database copyrights mean that the PAF (postcode address file) is copyright, as is your local telephone directory. With a map, the printed form may be covered by a copyright on the typographical arrangement, but the individual coordinates of the corners of a building are matters of fact and can't, individually be copyrighted. Nonetheless, once you start plotting many buildings, the work involved in compiling the information is recognized by a database copyright. Without database copyrights, there would be on copyright blocks on converting printed format maps to vector format. If you extract a single address from the PAF, to send letter, or a single number, from the phone book, to make a call, you are extracting the fact. If you create a directory, you are copying the database. The former is unrestricted (except by any contract for confidentiality). The latter is a copyright infringement. The OS owns the database copyright on its list of passive stations. Using the location of one of them for an isolated survey is just using a fact. Adding large numbers of them to OSM is a copyright infringement unless there is a licence that permits it. Doing so piecemeal still creates an infringement (if that were not the case, almost all use of commercial maps would be fair game, for a crowd sourced map). There are hints that the intent was an intent to licence with at most the equivalent of CC BY, but I've not seen anything that makes that explicit. On the other hand some of the references to OSTN02, which is actually a larger database, explicitly assert the database copyright, but also seem to release under a BSD licence, which, at most, would require some slight tweaking of copyright attributions. Please do not do anything based on this interpretation without verifying it yourself. (The copyright on OSM itself is essentially a database copyright.) > >> Depending on exactly which ground feature represents the station, > > That one is a small stud at ground level on a small concrete block > all surrounded by a rectangular metal fence maybe 30cm high, roughly 1m by > 1/2m. I must dig out a photograph. Having seen OS' photograph, I'm fairly sure this is the feature at 5.2m from the GPS plot, when viewed on the local Bing datum. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
