On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 12:53 PM, John Smith deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com
wrote:
The position of nodes are often derived from the position of other nodes.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever
known. (1)
and hence the secret of
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources (2)
On a more serious note:
I think it's important to remember that there's a difference between
(a) that the creation of something (B) has been influenced by something else
(A), even more directly impacted by A,
(b) that B is derived from A, and finally,
(c) that B is a derivative work of A.
I was involved with publishing (student) song books (in Finland) when I was
younger and we needed to do some wrestling to get the publishing rights
(without getting fined, not to mention take-down/pull-out demands) for a
number of (student) songs the lyrics of which were not only clearly
influenced by copyrighted song lyrics but were quite clearly derived from
them.
At the end of the day we couldn't publish one song which was deemed a
derivative work but at the same time we were able to successfully get
publishing rights for many because they were _not_ seen being derivative
works even though there was a pretty clear link with many of them to the
original song.
In the mapping scene or any other international project there's obviously a
major difficulty in the fact that different countries laws / tradition treat
these issues differently. But the basics are nevertheless the same, I
_guess_. Surely OSM can't rely on guessing so it makes sense to be safer
than sorry. But it IMHO it doesn't make sense to try to be holier than the
pope, so to say.
But nevertheless _I_ would say that copyright/IPR-wise there's 0% left of
anything protectable if (1) someone's e.g. traced a road from imagery, but
has only marked it with, say, highway=road (meaning he states that he has no
clue of what kind of road/path/track/river?/ditch/wall/other it is) and then
(2) I go to survey the road with GPS, upload the trace (or even simply
overlay it with existing data in JOSM) and then tweak the road according to
my trace+observations + tag it approriately. And I say that this holds true
even if I'd leave a few nodes untouched (because they happened to be where
my trace was).
Now, surely some jack-ass lawyer could claim that a single (or the few)
node(s) that I didn't touch creates a copyright violation and sue me. I
could only say: please do. But I know s/he wouldn't. My work could very well
be said having been derived (to an extent) from the original work -- but
would certainly not be a derived work. (And someone may well disagree with
that, and I appreciate that opinion. But I could bet my head on it.)
Having said the above it's obviously a different thing that how OSM as a
community wants to or even should handle various different situations
regarding license change and dealing with data from non-complient sources. I
just wanted to note what I think holds very true; that there's a difference
between being derived from (to an extent!) and being a derivative work (as
seen by law).
Just my 2 cents,
-Jaakko
(1) Chuck Palahniukhttp://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2546.Chuck_Palahniuk
(Invisible Monsters http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/849507)
(2) Albert Einsteinhttp://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9810.Albert_Einstein
(misquoated to him, it seems)
--
http://osm.org/user/jaakkoh
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