On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Steve Bennett <stevag...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Ben Last <ben.l...@nearmap.com> wrote: >>> If that's not feasible, I hope you use some other technique to make it >>> very >>> clear to users that they must not copy street names from a non-free map. >> >> We understand this point very well :) > > Heh, I'm glad you do, because it's far from obvious to me. Street > names are not copyright.
That depends on the jurisdiction. A collection of items that would not gain copyright individually can gain copyright protection based on the effort of collecting them (Sweat of the Brow) or based on the way that the items are presented (Skill and Judgment). So those are both concerns in some jurisdictions. You might argue that "I can copy one name. That one name can't be protected based on systemic rights." But a content provider might argue, "A series of OSM contributors each extracted small bits in a way that was systemic and substantial..." More often of concern is terms of use of the source material. You are restricted from extracting or deriving based on the terms and conditions of the source site. So it has been the accepted position of the OSM community, that out of an abundance of caution, and an abundance of respect for copyright and adjacent law, and an abundance of respect for the wishes, spirit and licenses of publishers of maps, even proprietary maps, that "we don't copy stuff from other maps without explicit permission." But sometimes we get lazy and say, "Don't use copyright sources" as a shorthand when we mean all of the above. Because often our victims, er, "conversational partners" glaze over after the first seven seconds of that little lecture. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
