[OSM-legal-talk] [OSGeo-Discuss] Promoting freely available geodata
Richard Fairhurst
richard at systemeD.net
Fri Mar 30 18:38:40 BST 2007
Hi non-OpenStreetMap people,
SteveC wrote:
> Our legal-talk and other lists have found a whole ton of problems with
> it though (we use a CC license in OSM).
If you want a very very quick summary of some of the legal problems:
- Read http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases.html , which
explains how CC licences protect copyright, not database right.
- Read http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/
gradeDigitalRightsIssues.pdf , which explains how geodata is
protected by database right, not copyright.
You get the gist.
That's an EU perspective. The US doesn't have a database and the
situation may be that sweat-of-the-brow geodata can't be copyrighted
at all (google Feist v. Rural, Mason v. Montgomery Data).
I won't go much into the _ethical_ problems, but the one that keeps
cropping up in OSM is the definition of a "derived work" when you
apply a copyleft licence to geodata. Should the whole item based on
the geodata (a printed map, a multilayer webmap) be considered
"derived", or just the underlying geodata? The OSM community differs
on this point.
There you go, a year of legal-talk gzipped down into one mail
message. :)
cheers
Richard
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