[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-talk] Community vs. Licensing

Francis Davey fjmd1a at gmail.com
Mon Aug 30 08:17:46 BST 2010


On 30 August 2010 01:21, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's before you start considering all the various government data
> released under copyright licenses. Are you saying all their lawyers
> have no clue about copyright laws, or that the governments themselves
> aren't able to change laws to make map data copyrightable?

My experience of government lawyers suggests that's not a very good
argument, at least in the UK.

The way in which our government operates is to make available data on
various standard - i.e. cross-organisation - licenses. No-one worries
about whether those licenses actually protect the work in question
unless specific works are valuable and make money for the organisation
(a relatively small fraction of all works created by UK public
bodies). In those cases specific and hand-crafted licenses are often
created for that reason.

Consider:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents

which is a Bill that was passed by the UK Parliament this year. If you
look at the copyright licence its the standard Crown Copyright
licence, but in fact no copyright subsists in the contents of a Bill
after Royal Assent (s.166(5)(a) of the Copyright Designs and Patents
Act 1988). So in fact the licence is useless because there is no
copyright in the Bill, but that doesn't stop it being claimed because
no-one is quite that pedantic.

Sometimes copyright is claimed quite deliberately when it might not
apply (eg to the postcode database) - a sensible strategy to use if
you don't want people using your data and believe they aren't going to
make a fight of it.

Governments are not of one mind on this - some elements in government
want to see data out there, other parts want to hold on to it. I've
been involved in a number of internal discussions with government
departments about this and this internal contradiction is very real.

Generally its best not to work out what the law actually is based on
what governments do - not least because they often lose courts cases.

-- 
Francis Davey



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