[OSM-legal-talk] Factual Information License and Produced Works?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Jean-Christophe Haessig wrote:
> Otherwise, anyone could make legal copies of nearly any photography
> (e.g. landscapes)

Photography is regarded as an art form by the law and the photographer 
usually enjoys copyright because it is assumed that the selection of the 
motive, and daytime, and angle, and weather, and camera settings are a 
creative act.

This reasoning has been stretched by courts to include even satellite 
photography, where they say that whoever wrote or configured the 
software that decides which pictures get taken enjoys the copyright as a 
photographer.

There is no clear legal stance on deriving facts from photographs; there 
have been court decisions that said the photographer's copyright is not 
violated if somebody simply uses the photo to draw a road or a building 
outline based on it. Similarly, some scholars believe that it is 
perfectly all right to use Google Aerial Imagery to derive OSM data from 
  it. OSM does not have an answer to these question, but chose to err on 
the side of caution, i.e. we only advocate what we *know* is legal and 
not what *might* be legal.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"