[OSM-legal-talk] New license status

[Matt Amos]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:04 PM, James Livingston <doctau at mac.com> wrote:
> On 28/09/2009, at 11:16 PM, Gustav Foseid wrote:
>> Well... There is no copyright that expires after 15 years. Sui
>> generis database rights expire after 15 years, but copyright is
>> hardly very relevant for an OpenStreetMap database dump.
>
> In Europe maybe - however there are countries where database do have
> inherent copyright separate from the copyright over their contents,
> for example in Australia. I think the copyright wouldn't expire for 70
> years here, which is definitely more than the 15 for European sui
> generis database rights.
>
> I see the qualification that "substantial" is in terms of quality,
> quantity or a combination of both - but out of interest, is it
> supposed to mean basically what it means in terms of the underlying
> copyright/database rights?

yes. but since there hasn't been any case law on what substantial
means (at least in europe, yet), we were advised to create
"guidelines" on what we, as a community, consider substantial.
apparently this would likely be taken into account, in the absence of
case law, if anything goes in front of a judge.

cheers,

matt