[OSM-legal-talk] Progressing OSM to a new data Licence regime

[Lars Aronsson]

Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:

> Ps. does that mean that if someone has a 1993 or earlier postcode DB
> lying around, we can bulk load it into Free the Postcode?

Yes, it should be free.  Or at least one from 1992 would have 
become free at the end of December 31, 2007.  Just like Project 
Gutenberg, Wikisource and similar book digitization projects make 
a point of moving as close as possible to the 70 year limit, by 
scanning books by authors who died in 1937*, free data projects 
should republish any 15 year old databases where the database 
rights have expired.

However, you should make sure how the "database rights" were 
defined in 1993 in your country and how the current law applies to 
them.  In many European countries, database rights were introduced 
by a European Council Directive 96/9/EC of March 1996, still only 
twelve years ago.

Wikipedia says**: "In the United Kingdom, it was introduced as 
"The Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997" and came 
into force on January 1, 1998."  But how does that apply to 
databases from 1993?  Ask a U.K. jurist.

In Scandinavia, catalog rights (for printed catalogs) were 
introduced in the copyright law of 1960 (Sweden) or 1961 (Denmark, 
Norway), having a 10 year protection, which was later expanded to 
15 years and served as inspiration for the European database 
rights.

* e.g. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scan_parties

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se