[OSM-legal-talk] Privacy and Terms

[Ed Avis]

Richard Fairhurst <richard at ...> writes:

>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Case_law
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Statute_law

Thanks, I've had a look at that.  It seems to agree with the usual
layman's view of the subject: that facts are not copyrightable, though
the expression of them may be; and that many countries recognize a
database right.

>Bear in mind also that Creative Commons themselves have said several times
>that CC-BY-SA is not suitable for OSM. For example,
>
>"In the United States, data will be protected by copyright only if they
>express creativity. Some databases will satisfy this condition, such as a
>database containing poetry or a wiki containing prose. Many databases,
>however, contain factual information that may have taken a great deal of
>effort to gather, such as the results of a series of complicated and
>creative experiments. Nonetheless, that information is not protected by
>copyright and cannot be licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons
>license."

Is anyone seriously suggesting that because factual information is not
covered by copyright, then in countries where no database right is
recognized, map data can be copied with impunity?

If so, then it will be okay to start copying data from pre-1990s
Ordnance Survey maps?

I know this point has been raised many times, and the discussion tends
to go in circles, but I think it has never been satisfactorily
answered.  Either copyright applies to map data or it doesn't; and if
it doesn't, then why are we wasting time walking round with GPS
devices?

If it is the settled view of the OSM project, based on legal advice,
that copyright plus CC-BY-SA does not protect the Openstreetmap
geodata from being copied and incorporated into other works, can an
official statement be made to this effect?  It would save a lot of
effort for people like People's Map or Google, who would love to start
copying the OSM data if it weren't for the pesky share-alike
restrictions.

>But if you can't
>summon the energy to read all that, and I wouldn't blame you, do at least
>read Charlotte Waelde's paper and the key US cases (Rural vs Feist, Mason vs
>Montgomery).

I'm reading the Montgomery one now.  Which do you mean by Waelde's
paper?

>For what it's worth, my interpretation at present is that a simple OSM map
>of a housing estate, such as http://osm.org/go/euwtbOAo-- , is not at all
>copyrightable in the US (the most liberal jurisdiction). It's a simple
>collection of facts - street names and geometries - arranged in an
>uncreative fashion, and Rural vs Feist tells us that this doesn't merit
>copyright. Therefore CC-BY-SA will not protect it.

Interesting.  Do you mean only the map, or the underlying data too?

>Something more intensively mapped, such as http://osm.org/go/eutDzIjd-- ,
>may perhaps attract copyright protection for the database structure - which,
>in OSM, is principally the tagging system. It could go either way for the
>database contents, which is still pretty uncreative _given_ that structure,
>but could be argued to involve careful assessment of sources and so on
>(Mason vs Montgomery).

>From my experience of doing mapping, it seems there is a lot of
creativity and freedom, with many distinct ways to express the same
physical fact.  But you might be right, perhaps in the USA map data
can be freely copied.  In which case the OSM project has already
achieved its aim (of free map data) kind of by default, and all that
remains is to view some areas in Google Maps and start copying in the
streets and other features.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>