On 19/12/10 21:52, Anthony wrote:
What is "the German equivalent of a 'derived work'"? And, if you're saying it's different, then how can you say it's equivalent?
Your local copyright law almost certainly mentions "adaptation" rather than "derived work". Your referring to "derived work" is therefore the use of an equivalent concept in your own legal system.
It's quite a leap to go from the fact that aerial photographs are protected by copyright law, which is probably true even here in the United States (with the note that aerial photographs are not the same as satellite photographs), to saying that a tracing of an aerial photograph is a derivative work.
If there isn't a copyright in the original, work that copies from it cannot infringe that copyright because it doesn't exist.
If there is a copyright then producing a recognisable copy of some part of it will, modulo fair dealing (or fair use, which is its equivalent concept) it will infringe on that copyright. Tracing in the tracing paper sense will certainly do this. It was possible to infringe on copyright before digital copying existed...
Now if you're talking about tracing ways from photos I would agree, philosophically, that it is a leap to regard those as derivatives. But if it's a leap the courts have made or that companies with more lawyers than OSM've got have made then that's what we have to deal with.
If you're concerned that tracing aerials might create a derived work (which I'm not), then you need a license from the copyright owner of the image, which is probably not Microsoft.
You need a licence from someone with sufficient rights to grant you that licence. Which in this case is Microsoft.
- Rob. _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
