On Feb 2, 2022, at 1:50 AM, Warin <61sundow...@gmail.com> wrote: > The 'facts cannot be copyright' may be a USA thing that does not work > elsewhere. Don't know but I would not rely on it alone.
While I am reasonably certain this is true in the USA, I don't believe that makes it necessarily false elsewhere. Not to start an argument, but I'd be curious to know if a "fact" (about a closed section of roadway) falls under Australia's "Part III Works" (of copyright law there) of literary, artistic, musical and dramatic works, or "Part IV Subject Matter" (e.g. sound recordings, films, broadcasts...). It would seem to be "neither" (and leaving Australian copyright law with nothing to apply to), but I'm happy to be enlightened otherwise. Bob simply asks whether what he knows about a closed section of roadway going into OSM is a violation of ODbL. Questions of "where did the knowledge of this come from?" are valid to ask, but when the answer is "direct, personal observation," what is copyright-able? Any copyright law which claims that publishing (or re-publishing) straight facts is a violation of law needs to be examined in the light of what OSM Contributors do all day long: which is to put facts about the real world into a geospatial database. We're in real trouble if we can't do that. The corollary is that I don't think we're in real trouble. Again, it all seems to come down to "how did you learn about that?" If it was a government-published (maybe Crown Copyright holds, I wouldn't be surprised if it does) radio-disseminated Livetraffic broadcast (and again, for various reasons, that could go either way), I'd be wary of entering it (in Australia, but in USA, if published by federal gov't, it's automatically in the public domain; the fifty states vary somewhat but I'd say a trend is for "open data" or "sunshine" laws to apply and make it "freely" available). However, if it is Bob traveling to both sides of the closure, observing signs and concluding that such "facts" are directly observable truths in the real world, I'd offer him my two thumbs up to putting those data into OSM with little or no worry. If Bob heard a radio broadcast and those data fell under copyright for some reason, or he knows they were derived and/or explicitly Google Maps data, well, "not." But if he ALSO made the drive noted above, he can "mentally subtract" the radio/Google slap-that-might-say-don't and ignore those, allowing his "personal observations" to supersede. And maybe he even enters "personal observation" as the source of the data in his changeset comments as he does. (I've done that, and I'm proud when I do). (OK, that WAS kind of lengthy). _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
