[cc:ed to legal-talk] Andy Allan wrote:
> That's pretty clear cut - i-Cubed own copyright over the imagery, and > haven't given anyone any rights to do stuff with them - unless they > explicitly say otherwise. "Public Domain" isn't viral for derived > works. Probably the biggest thing I've learned about copyright since getting involved with OSM is how easy it is to overstate your rights as copyright holder. That's not really too surprising for those of us from the UK, which has a very maximalist attitude to geodata copyright (or at least the OS does, and it shouts loudest): if you come from the States you'll have a different take on these things. I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce definitively on OAM, as I've not researched it particularly deeply. But I'd be reasonably certain that iCubed's colour correction in itself doesn't qualify as copyright-worthy for the purposes of tracing, so there's no issue in deriving from their flavour of Landsat. It's a bit like the NPE scans where I say "you can trace from these without restriction" - that's not me being nice (well, partly :) ), that's a recognition that the acts of scanning and rectification haven't created a new copyright over the geodata. (The "severable improvement" stuff may be relevant here. Maybe. Someone who knows remotely wtf they're talking about will be able to do better than me.) With the non-Landsat OAM images, the same argument can be had. Does rectification against Google create a new copyright? I can see an argument either way: a year ago I'd have said "yes it does", now I'm leaning a bit more towards "no it doesn't". But it really comes down to how cautious/paranoid you are, and OSM always takes the ultra-cautious route, which is why Steve's asked them to be removed for now. (It's reasonably easily settled - either get Google to give the ok, or rerectify against OSM. Better still, rerectify against OSM's GPS traces alone, thereby sidestepping potential CC-BY-SA issues.) Oh yeah, and then you have to think about contracts. Let's not even go there. Side-issue: the discussion at WhereCamp about "are Google and Microsoft killing the ecosystem?" looks really interesting - maybe someone who was there could post or blog about it. But, you know, a really great way for them to nurture the ecosystem - which is ultimately in their interests - would be if they could give definitive, permissive answers to things like this. Is anyone asking? Should we? (Even better still, they could do a Yahoo with their aerial imagery - yeah, I know, oink oink flap flap.) cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
