[OSM-legal-talk] License Cut-over and critical mass

[Richard Weait]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 7:37 AM, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/7/20 andrzej zaborowski <balrogg at gmail.com>:
>> If you find a planet on a bus there's no contract you may be affected
>> by.  There may be copyright, which may protect the content.  If
>> there's nothing written on it then you basically have to assume "All
>> rights reserved", provided there's any originality, creativity etc. in
>> that planet dump which is not confirmed.
>
>
> usually if you find something (let's say on a bus) you will not become
> legally the proprietor (in the jurisdictions I know of). You have no
> rights whatsoever on the found object but instead have the obligation
> to give it back to the proprietor (e.g. by giving the found object to
> the bus staff, or to a government agency/ the police).

Where you are not legally obliged to return the object (under the
doctrine of "Finders Keepers") the finders rights are still be
limited.  For example, you do not gain copyright of photograph that
you find on a bus.  You might sell that found photograph under First
Sale Doctrine[1] but you may not duplicate it and sell 500 copies of
it.

If you find planet on a bus you are not finding just a pile of ordered
ones and zeros.  It's on media of some type.  You might sell the disk
as is, but copying the data and selling it would be legally risky.  A
Reasonable Person[2] would understand that there could be copyright
works included in the data on the disk.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person