On 7 September 2010 16:51, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote: > > Ah, I see there is a provision for this in the EU database right: "In > respect of a database created by a group of natural persons jointly, > the exclusive rights shall be owned jointly."
Yes, that's what I was alluding to. If there were no OSMF and the project was being carried out by a group of interested individuals - as quite a few crowd-gathering of data projects are - then that might apply. > > Of course, if a joint database right works like joint copyright, it's > fairly useless. Any joint owner of the database right would have full > sub-licensable rights to the database, so long as they account for and > share all their profits in using that right. All it takes is one > joint owner to grant a free worldwide license to do anything, and the > database right is effectively gone. Hmmmm, that sounds wrong to me. Joint ownership of copyright does not work in that way at all. Either owner may prevent the other from (for example) copying their joint work. If one joint owner licences their work, it might well estop them from making any claim against licensees, but the other joint owners would not be bound by it. That's why joint copyright ownership is a ghastly thing and I try to dissuade clients from entering into joint ownership agreements unless there's a really good reason to do so. Regulation 16(1) of the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997 works in a similar way. It states: "16. — (1) Subject to the provisions of this Part, a person infringes database right in a database if, without the consent of the owner of the right, he extracts or re-utilises all or a substantial part of the contents of the database." Where "consent of the owner" means the joint consent of all owners. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk