[Legal-general] The elephant in the room

[Gustav Foseid]

Richar Fairhust a few days ago, on one of the other lists, said:

> Of course at this point your eye is mysteriously drawn to the elephant
> in the room, which is "what deserves copyright protection?".

As important this is to the enitre project, I think it is suprisingly little
discussed. In addition to copyright, sui generis databse protection is of
course equally important.

> Adding a couple of nodes to a way to neaten out the curve: no way.

This sounds reasonable, and I have not seen anything that indicates that
this gives the "author" any rights for the way.

> Simple tracing from Yahoo or NPE: nope, probably not, unless your
> jurisdiction is _really_ friendly towards "sweat of the brow". (Most
> aren't AIUI.)

Again I think Ruchard is right. What is the status of "sweat of the brow",
which I believe is mainly a UK term, after the database directive?

This could, if done extensively, result in a protected database. Talking EU
database directive, it would require a significant investment, a term only
loosely defined, as far as I know.

> Putting your GPS on the dashboard, following a road for 30 miles,
> getting home, uploading the track, then faithfully tracing along it:
> doesn't look much like original creative work to me.

No, probably not creative, but again bordering on a database.

Another example: If a municipality assign street names, and keep a list of
these names in a database, is this database protected? And if it is, is this
still a database when printed on a number of signs and distributed in the
municipality? Would then a OSM surveyor extract a substantial part of this
database after surveying street names in the entire municipality?


 - Gustav
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