Nic Roets wrote: > It has been said on this list that facts cannot be copyrighted. > And IMHO gps traces are facts. Does this mean we can use data > from any of the sites mention below ? Or are gps traces subject > to the same type of copyright as photos ?
In Britain and several other jurisdictions, the question is whether there's enough "originality" or "creativity" in the work. If you're just driving to work anyway, and you stick a GPS receiver on your dashboard to get the tracklog, I doubt the result merits copyright protection. But if you go out and survey an entire housing estate purposefully, does it? I'm not sure. In US law I suspect not (Rural vs Feist, as usual). In the UK it might. There's also the question (in the EU) of database right over a collection of separate tracks, but database right probably doesn't apply to one single track. (One of my ongoing regrets about the whole PD-vs-copyleft thing is that we've missed the opportunity, as the first and biggest open collaborative data project in the world, to make a stand and say "facts are unambiguously free": for edge cases like this, we should be playing the good guys, not trying to assert copyright over something marginal. If we'd been PD from the start, this would have set a precedent for others to do so - exactly what copyleft tries to achieve, but without the hassle of the licence getting in the way. Still, all water under the bridge.) cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/GPS-traces-and-copying-of-facts-tp21358576p21372851.html Sent from the OpenStreetMap - Legal Talk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
