> Clearly I am the world's worst communicator and should think several > times before contributing anything about law to this list. My > assumption (which was explained in what I said) was that there would > be no tracing of features - that is no copying of the map.
Not at all, it's most useful to have different points of view :) The problem is where the legal line is to be drawn. It's clearly against copyright to trace all the features of a map and publish the result. The problem starts when you aren't tracing _all_ the features of the map, but perhaps just one cycle route. That in itself isn't copying the map, but OS Sales people still want you to pay them £5,000 per annum if you want to publish that line. Whether that is legally enforceable, or reasonable, is open to question, it seems. Then you can take it one level further, by asking about tracing a single point from the map. Again, OS Sales want you to buy an expensive license if you publish this point, but this must be even less likely to be enforceable in law. Then we have the problem of the aggregation of all these traced lines and points: if you get enough of them in one place, you do in effect end up with a copy of significant parts of the OS mapping, and that could be seen to break copyright :( Copyright doesn't seem to work very well as a concept on the internet with thousands of people getting involved... > there is no copyright in *data* per se, copyright subsists in works, > be they maps, musical performances or books. Data may represent a work > in which copyright does subsist so that copying the data is a copying > of the work (because copies of a work can be made indirectly). Imagine, for argument's sake, that someone organised a website that allowed people to enter a word each from a copyrighted book, along with its page number and its position on the page. This data goes into a nice big database. I would imagine that typing in a word from a copyrighted book, with some metadata about that word (e.g. "banana, page 6, word 102"), wouldn't break that book's copyright. So the person submitting that word isn't in trouble. The person running the site isn't copying the book either, but the end result is still potentially a copy of the book. Is there something like "inciting to break copyright" or "facilitating the breaking of copyright"? > The database right is really different from copyright and something > else again Would the database that the above people have created be theirs, to do what they like with (e.g. exporting the text of the book in the right order)? > There are difficulties with drawing lines here (in the legal > metaphorical sense) and its expensive to trace them out by taking > matters to court, hence confusion abounds. I had hoped to throw some > light on the subject but fear I have failed to do so. Yes, I agree. My old law lecturer made it very clear what "the law" is: "the law is what the judge says it is". Until this is tested in court, we won't ever know the answer. We need OS to take action against someone, or someone willing to poke their head above the parapet like Ernest Marples, but with the aim of going to court to find out the question (the answer's almost certainly 42 ;) ) Cheers! Anthony -- www.fonant.com - Quality web sites Fonant Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company No. 7006596 Registered office: Grafton Lodge, 15 Grafton Road, Worthing, West Sussex, BN11 1QR _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
