2009/7/28 John Smith <delta_foxt...@yahoo.com>: > > In Australia in Telstra won a lawsuit against people OCR'ing the street > directory and selling white/yellow pages on CD. For all intents and purposes > Telstra owns the copyright on all Australian White/Yellow page directories > and now Telstra is a publicly listed company.
A similar lawsuit (on TV program listings) was appealed earlier this year, and got the opposite result. It's a lot more complicated now, but in some situations you can get away with it. Basically the judge said that sweat of the brow did not a copyright make - so a collection of facts can't be copyrighted, thought the presentation of those facts can. There was some commentary at the time that this affected the Telstra rulings earlier, though as far as I know nobody has tried to do anything about it. I'd want to talk to a lawyer about it before I tried. And I don't know if the TV company counter appealed at a higher level. > Also in Australia it's not free to list in the yellow pages for anyone, it's > free to be listed in the white pages though I think. Um, that's not quite accurate. Everybody who has a "business" phone line, as opposed to a residential one, gets one free simple listing in the yellow pages, under the main category for your company. If you don't have a business line, or want more listings under other categories, or a bigger add, or even just bold or coloured print, then it costs. It's actually to YP's benefit to list as many as possible, because then people are more likely to pay more for a bigger add to stand out. The company I work for has never paid for a listing, and would like to get rid of the one free one, as we don't get customers that way and the only people who call us from it aren't actually looking for what we do. YP won't remove it, though. Stephen _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk