Jo Walsh wrote:
dear all,
I tried to sum up the highlights of the discussion that's been
hammering the osgeo/geodata and openstreetmap/legal-talk lists over
the last few days. Word is that Science Commons say "copyright based
licenses don't apply to geographic information (as fact collection)"
so there's no point applying a CC- or GPL- derivative license to it.
That is simply not correct in many jurisdictions outside of the US where
there is copyright for 'data' (or, as in the EU, a similar sui generis
right). For this very reason the Dutch CC team explicitly wrote database
rights into their CC license (in no small part because one of the world
experts on database rights, Bernt Hugenholtz, heads the centre where
CC-Netherlands is based).
There was actually some recent discussion of this on this list see in
particular this post (and the links therein):
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-March/000360.html
I also know that John Willbanks (of Science Commons) has particularly
strong views on these issues -- I had a lengthy exchange on this issue
with him back around december time on the SPARC open-data list:
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OpenData/Message/100.html
http://blog.okfn.org/2007/04/01/copyright-not-applicable-to-geodata/
As usual where data licensing is concerned I Am Frustrated, OSGeo has
a mandate to offer sane and helpful advice to those wishing to open
license geographic data, there is a chance to set a precedent with a
couple of different public bodies but advice such as the above seems
like a setback from the rough consensus there was a couple of years ago.
As I said above this advice is plain wrong in many jurisdictions outside
of the US (even in the US it is not clear how far the Feist exclusion
extends). Also does it matter what CC think about this? As Paula LeDieu
said at OK 1.0: just draft your own (see e.g. the efforts of Talis whose
licensed is aimed at bibliographic community:
http://www.talis.com/tdn/tcl). Since you have got the rights (at least
outside of the US) you are free to do what you want (I have made several
noises to CC-EW about incorporating database rights explicitly into the
license but as yet I don't think anything has happened on this point).
I quite like the idea of a click-use contract if it is machine-negotiable,
cf the project that John Sheridan has going with OPSI right now.
But this all sounds novel, I want to be able to point at solid prior art.
The technological implementation (e.g. click-use) is quite separate from
whether the license is valid -- i.e. is enforceable. The general point
is that in some jurisdictions there are no existing IP rights in the
data so there is nothing to license and hence the license, and
specifically thinks like the share-alike provisions, aren't enforceable.
This is very clearly not the case in the EU since we have DB rights
and even in many other jurisdictions there is simply copyright in the data.
Thus the simple message to the openstreetmap and other list should be:
stop worrying and keep licensing.
~rufus
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