On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 10:42:06AM -0700, Ian White wrote: > yeah, as usual, taken out of context..I said local advertising (print+online) > is around $17b > > but isn't the real interesting story more about spatial data and who > owns what...? come on, let's get it on! i know steve c and sean have > some strong opinions about this!
In this case? Not in my eyes. A specific work-for-hire was created -- presumably comprised of data and tools to create the data. Both of those would then be owned by the company which hired Wahl to perform the work. "Vermont-based mapping company Maponics is now suing Wahl to keep him from creating any more neighborhood maps "derived from or containing parts of" the original maps he produced four years ago, which defined 7,000 neighborhoods in 100 cities. Wahl did that work as a contractor for a real estate web portal." The data he created there wasn't his. Creating derived data from work that isn't yours is clearly a violation of copyright. I'm not aware of any significant legal opinion that holds that geodata is all in the public domain, especially something so subjective as neighborhood boundaries. (Certainly *you* can't believe that: as far as I understand it, one of Urban Mapping's products is a set of neighborhood boundaries, no?) Neighborhoods especially have to be seen to some extent as a creative work -- and therefore protected by copyright, and not possible to derive further from without an appropriate license. OSM is going out of its way in its current licensing efforts to ensure that something like this takes place only under the restrictions the license puts on things: "Public Domain" is not the goal, "Openly licensed" is. I don't know the specific license that Wahl sells data under, but there's a fair chance that he wouldn't be able to use OSM as a base for something like this -- specifically because it would give any of his customers the rights to be a redistributor unto themselves, cutting him out of the loop (and the cash). To me, there doesn't seem to be anything complex here: Data was created as a contractor. The organization contracting him owned that data. Assuming that the data was then used as a basis for further work -- something that I can't comment on, but Maponics is clearly claiming -- then the derived work is only usable subject to the restrictions Maponics has placed on it -- which appears to be the standard "All Rights Reserved". Neighborhoods aren't facts. Street intersections, maybe, but not neighborhoods. With that in mind, there's not a question in my mind that this work is protected to some extent, and Wahl appears to have (solely based on the article) violated those protections. Now, there's always more under the surface. There's no way for those of us outside the loop to guess how much of the data is actually derived, and that's the thing that the court will decide (or the plantiff and defendant will settle over). The article doesn't lay out anything world changing: It's simply a case of "Work for hire used by contractor as basis for further work without permission." Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
