[talk-au] Fwd: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL License + Outline Procedure
James Livingston
doctau at mac.com
Tue Mar 3 01:46:58 GMT 2009
On 28/02/2009, at 3:38 PM, Jim Croft wrote:
> Putting words into their mouths, I think the argument would be that
> the decision-making involved in selection, storage, management and
> display of these fact is indeed a creative act, even though the facts
> themselves aren't. A blank screen magically comes alive - a map with
> dots, lines, symbols, colours and most importantly, communicated
> meaning. Sure smells like creativity to me...
>
> I wonder if the Renaissance cartographers, or any cartographers for
> that matter, would regard their work as not creative? A well rendered
> informative and accurate map is a beautiful thing. They don't just
> happen; someone must have created them.
I definitely agree with that - as an interpretation of the underlying
data, they are a creative work and so copyright-able. I'm not a lawyer
(which is a good thing, because all this legal stuff makes my head
hurt), but I think the main issue is whether the collection data that
underlies the map is copyright-able. I've been reading up on it a bit
recently (trying to understand the ODbL) but obviously don't have the
deep knowledge a copyright lawyer will.
Copying someone's beautifully drawn map of Sydney is obviously not
allowed. However the location of the Sydney Opera House is a fact and
so not copyrightable, and the location and name of Paramatta Road, and
so on. While I can't copy the map as-is, can I create my own map
getting the location and name of everything from the original map?
Some countries (including Australia, I think) have something calls a
"database right" which means that a collection of facts can be
copyright-able even though individually they can't. The usual example
where this is used (and I believe what the first Australian court case
related to this is about) is phone books. The fact that person X lives
at a certain address and has a certain phone number is an un-
copyrightable fact, but are you allowed to produce a copy of the phone
book?
Back to OSM, what we have is pretty much just a collection of
geospatial facts (locations, names, etc). In countries that don't have
a database copyright, what stops someone from just copying the whole
database? As I understand it, that is the kind of thing ODbL is meant
to prevent, in addition to some other quirks of having a Creative
Commons licence used for something that isn't really creative.
I'm not certain whether any of that is actually correct, but it's what
I've managed to gather from reading some discussions on it.
James
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