On 10/09/2012 08:07 PM, Richard Weait wrote:
I'm glad that they want the data to propagate but I expect that it is not actually public domain. As I understand it, works only fall into the public domain once copyright expires. The noteworthy exception is for a class of US Federal government works[1], which doesn't apply here unless City of Fargo is not a federal gov't agency?
Moreover, the US Government can own copyrights that are assigned to it. It also owns copyright to its works in non-US jurisdictions; only US copyrights are denied to it. It is also increasingly common for copyright to vest in some contractor or other, with the US Government granted (a) an exclusive license, and (b) the title to the copyrights in the event of bankruptcy or dissolution of the contractor. (How this differs from the US Government owning the copyright outright, is hard to say.) Essentially the only area in which the US Government does not own the equivalent right-to-exclude that copyright would give it is in its edicts. The text of laws, executive regulations, judicial decisions, administrative rulings, and so on is not the subject matter of copyright by any government, Federal, State or local. This restriction is a matter of public policy: if citizens are bound to obey the law, they ought not to have to pay and enter into licenses in order to learn and teach the laws that they are bound to obey. Event this right is limited. In the Ninth Circuit, it has been held that incorporating a privately published standard (American Medical Association case coding) into the law by reference does not exhaust the copyright holder's interest; the Fifth Circuit held the opposite with regard to incorporating a privately published building code (Southern Building Code Congress). The Supreme Court has not ruled on this circuit split. Moreover, it is not clear that the idea that citizens have the right to know the laws they must obey is still good law. Gilmore v Gonzalez (http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/index.html) appears to legitimate the idea that citizens must obey a secret law: surely this is more offensive than merely requiring that they purchase a copyright license in order to be informed of a law, so I suspect that in the Ninth Circuit the case will be precedent overturning the idea that government edicts are not the subject of copyright. I would sooner rely on the notion that copyright does not cover an idea, only the expression of an idea. It does not cover facts, only the structure, sequence and organization of a compilation of the facts. Alas, I live in the Second Circuit, which has held that computer generated tax roll maps - little more than lists of geodetic coordinates - are creative works, and moreover, that the Freedom of Information Law does not require the government to do more than make a single copy of its works available for public inspection at a single location. (I suspect that the judges of the Second Circuit would be satisfied if government works were available for public inspection in a disused lavatory behind an abandoned filing cabinet with a sign on the door reading 'Beware of the Leopard.') In short, the idea that taxpayers own works of the government, by virtue of having paid for them, is a quaint vestige of the last century. It is no longer safe to assume that anything is out of copyright unless it bears an unambiguous copyright notice with a date prior to 1923 and there are reliable indicia of provenance that the copy being used is contemporaneous with the copyright (lest it be a copyrighted derivative work that bears the copyright notice of the original, and the copyright holder of the derivative assert rights). Everything seems to be subject to whatever copyright the richest publisher chooses to assert. Isn't plutocracy wonderful? -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
