On 09/09/2009 12:07, Pieren wrote: > On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Tom Hughes<[email protected]> wrote: >> Because (in the EU) Database Right kicks in and prohibits "substantial >> extraction". >> >> Tom > > If someone starts to "copy" the photos themselves, yes you are right. > But here, we speak about reading a street sign on a picture, not > copying the picture.
There's another aspect to this which I think rules out doing this: in order to be useful to us, the streetname has to be in a photo for which we know the location. That means it has been geolocated with respect to a map, which means the photo is itself a derived work. We are in effect using the copyrighted location, albeit indirectly, so whatever the situtation wrt the content of the photo, we are potentially infringing the copyright of the map used to geolocate it. This applies even to CCbySA photos gelocated on flickr etc, unless they were located using OSM in the first place, or by GPS. In StreetView they were presumably geolocated wrt a GPS, so that may, individually (but not collectively, for database reasons) just be a fact rather than a derivation. But as other people have said, it hardly matters as (a) we want to be not just clean, but squeaky clean, and (b) if someone with lots of money sues, it hardly matters what the true legal position is. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
