Ed Avis wrote: > Richard Fairhurst <rich...@...> writes: > > I kind of think it should be compulsory for anyone posting to legal-talk > to > > demonstrate that they have read, and understood, Rural vs Feist and > Mason vs > > Montgomery. > I will read those (anyone got a link?).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Case_law http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Statute_law Bear in mind also that Creative Commons themselves have said several times that CC-BY-SA is not suitable for OSM. For example, "In the United States, data will be protected by copyright only if they express creativity. Some databases will satisfy this condition, such as a database containing poetry or a wiki containing prose. Many databases, however, contain factual information that may have taken a great deal of effort to gather, such as the results of a series of complicated and creative experiments. Nonetheless, that information is not protected by copyright and cannot be licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons license." And so on and so forth. That's from http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases . That page is actually deprecated because CC now recommend, effectively, that data should be public domain. Given that CC, to me, has always appeared to have an unspoken policy of favouring share-alike as the default recommendation, that's pretty telling. It's a huge subject, one with lots of shades of grey and very little black-and-white, and one that has been discussed very, very extensively here, on various blogs and elsewhere in the last few years. But if you can't summon the energy to read all that, and I wouldn't blame you, do at least read Charlotte Waelde's paper and the key US cases (Rural vs Feist, Mason vs Montgomery). For what it's worth, my interpretation at present is that a simple OSM map of a housing estate, such as http://osm.org/go/euwtbOAo-- , is not at all copyrightable in the US (the most liberal jurisdiction). It's a simple collection of facts - street names and geometries - arranged in an uncreative fashion, and Rural vs Feist tells us that this doesn't merit copyright. Therefore CC-BY-SA will not protect it. (And given that this level of detail is on a par with the major commercial mapping sites, it's definitely something of value.) Something more intensively mapped, such as http://osm.org/go/eutDzIjd-- , may perhaps attract copyright protection for the database structure - which, in OSM, is principally the tagging system. It could go either way for the database contents, which is still pretty uncreative _given_ that structure, but could be argued to involve careful assessment of sources and so on (Mason vs Montgomery). But as is traditional at this point, I should point out that I am not a... you know the rest. :) cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Privacy-and-Terms-tp24185975p24325453.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
