80n wrote: > This is quite a good place to start: > http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Copyright_protection_of_databases
It's good to see licence sceptics starting to look at the case law too. There are of course a million things you could say about rights pertaining to factual compilations in the US. Several thousand of them have been said on this list over the past few years and I don't intend to bore everyone by repeating them. I will, however, repeat one point which I've made several times over the years (Google suggests http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-July/002603.html was a recent instance :) ). Whether geodata is copyrightable in the US is a "shades of grey" thing, not an "either/or". When a few years back I trudged round a Worcester housing estate with a GPS noting down the street names, then faithfully entered them into OSM, there certainly wasn't a minimal level of creativity there. If I were to do a detailed hiking survey of the Malvern Hills, carefully judging what might be a MTB-suitable trail, and what paths have become established despite not being RoWs, that would involve some creativity and thus merit some protection. And so on. This is well established in Mason v Montgomery Data, a case about copying data from a 'traditional' cartographic map, which I'm slightly surprised the Wikia article doesn't cite. It's regarded by commentators as the case that stretches the Feist v Rural judgement the most in favour of "compilations involve creativity", so it's a good one to test against. It concludes that Mason's maps are original through the "creativity in both the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the facts that they depict... and in the pictorial, graphic nature of the way that they do so". I wouldn't for a moment say that my Worcester estate survey involved any creative selection, coordination or arrangement: my Malvern Hills survey might well. So, as I've said several times before, some extracts from OSM involve copyright in the US, others don't. One could of course say "we're happy with only protecting some of our data, let's stick with CC-BY-SA". But given that I remember you (Etienne) remonstrating with me three or four years ago when I suggested "maybe we should allow people to derive the position of features not included on the map" (the same thing Ed Parsons keeps suggesting to OS), and you said "ah, but what if they plot the lamp-posts then reconstruct the road", I'm guessing you're still on the maximalist side. Ok. Some of OSM involves copyright in the States. What does that actually _mean_? Probably not what we think it does. I'll cut to the chase and just copy-and-paste the conclusion from that Wikia page: "In summary, very few of the post-Feist compilation cases have held entire works to be uncopyrightable. In fact, copyrightability of the entire work is seldom even contested. Disputes tend to focus instead on the scope of protection. Consistent with Feist's pronouncement that copyright affords compilations only 'thin' protection, most of the post-Feist appellate cases have found wholesale takings from copyrightable compilations to be non-infringing. This trend is carrying through to district courts as well." In case you didn't spot the interesting bit: "wholesale takings from copyrightable compilations [are] non-infringing" Holy cow. In other words, whether or not the compilation (the database) is copyrightable, you can still extract from it with impunity. In Feist, it actually says: "a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another’s publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement". Mason v Montgomery Data spots this in Feist, too: "The facts and ideas ... are free for the taking... The very same facts and ideas may be divorced from the context imposed by the author, and restated or reshuffled by second comers" And in Wikia's commentary on Warren Publishing v Microdos Data: "the only conduct that arguably can be said to infringe is verbatim duplication of the entire work". It's all good fun. But however much we content ourselves with happy thoughts of "ah, but the smoothness tag is creative" and so on, we need to think about what an alleged infringement might actually be. Let's say our mappers have corrected all the TIGER geometries using aerial/satellite imagery. Is that a hell of a lot of work? Yes. Is that commercially valuable? Yes. Would J Map Co, aiming to compete on a street map level with Google et al, like that data? Hell yes. Are they bothered about the smoothness tag? Hell no. Can you _unambiguously_ say that the "wholesale taking" of this part of OSM is an infringement according to US case law? I can't. Shades of grey, shades of grey. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Frederik-declares-war-on-data-imports-tp5385741p5392366.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
