[OSM-legal-talk] decision removing data

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Emilie Laffray <emilie.laffray at gmail.com> wrote:
> <troll>Hum, I think that quite a few things on Wikipedia can be considered
> creative in the first place allowing for copyrights to kick in. </troll>
> Hum, in Wikipedia, it is not the facts that is protected but the writing. In
> OSM, we are talking about a physical representation of those facts namely
> their geometries, which is quite different.

In what way is OSM "a physical representation" any more than
Wikipedia?  In both cases it's just bits in a database.

The representation is what's protected.  The facts are not.  If you
extract those facts, the copyright protection disappears.  So, for
instance, when Metaweb scanned Wikipedia to extract factual
information and import it into Freebase, they were able to do so
without licensing the resulting database under CC-BY-SA (they licensed
it under CC-BY).

Likewise, if you extract the facts from OSM, the copyright protection
disappears.  That's going to be true in *any* jurisdiction without a
sui generis database right, and might even be true in some
jurisdictions with a database right.  And it's going to be true
regardless of whether or not there's an ODbL, because you don't have
to agree to the ODbL to extract the data.  You can get the data from a
third party, or download it from bittorrent, or extract it from
produced works...