[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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