[OSM-legal-talk] PD declaration non binding?

Matija Nalis mnalis-gmane at voyager.hr
Sun Jul 25 00:55:03 BST 2010


On Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:05:02 -0700 (PDT), Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> TimSC wrote:
>> In that case, is it legally sound if I download my own contribution 
>> due, to database rights?
>
> Difficult to say - I can see an argument either way. A database right
> certainly exists and governs extraction from the database; but if what
> you're extracting is exactly what you put in (with the trivial exception of
> node ID renumbering), it's very very difficult to argue that any additional
> rights have been created.
>
> Regardless, restricting what you can do with your own contributions would be
> such a blatantly unreasonable and unfair thing to do that I am 100% sure
> OSMF wouldn't do it. 

100% ? I'd never play with such numbers, not in HA systems, and much less in
case where politics and "IP" laws might be involved :)

Sure, they all might the great guys as of now, but suppose OSM becomes
importatnt enough to big players, who says TeleAtlas or Google or someone
won't get say new 1000 members in OSMF and have a strong majority of votes
to pass any such thing? it's not like such things never happend (just
rembemer OOXML ballot-stuffing at ISO when Microsoft managed to buy out
majority of new country representatives just to get fasttracked)

As for the blatantly unreasonable and unfair things not happening, we've
had a fine example not so long ago in Croatia with copyright law. 

So here goes the real-life story story 
(on one of the the absurdities of one of copyright laws):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The guy composed some music on his computer (completely by himself without
using anything copyrighed or whatever), and put it up with some graphics
(also self-made) to present his products (he was into furniture design).
Nothing too complex, just a catalog and few animations with some background
music. Then he took the computer to the trade fair with the rest of his
products, to better present it to interested visitors...

Few days later, he gets a court invitation for copyright violation.

As it happens, the agent of ZAMP (which is copyright royalties collecting
agency in Croatia, something like ASCAP or BMI in USA, or SACEM in France)
was visiting the fair, and noticed this "unathorized public performing of
audio works" and promptly registered it with court.

So the guy sees it is ridiculous, as he himself is the author and bearer of
rights, and promptly goes to court and explains the situation and that he is
the sole author of the music, so the ZAMP agent must have been confused
about that.

The court listens to him and takes that into account, and then proceeds to
explain to him that he *is* guilty after all. As it happens, in Croatian
copyright law, the ZAMP agency gets presumption on collecting money for
"protecting rights" for *all* public audio performances on Croatian 
teritory, no matter who the author is (or how s/he licensed the data) 
*unless* explicitely notified in writing beforehand by author that he 
doesn't want that protection for his/her works.

As the guy failed to explicitely register himself before the fair as
exception to this presumption (as he had no idea he needed to), although he
was publically performing HIS OWN WORKS, he was in violation of the
copyright law and fined accordingly (the court did take as mitigating
circumstance that he was the author of the works, and that is was his first
violation, so he was fined only the minimum fine allowed for such violation)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

So I could quite vividly imagine how downloading your own data (after it
enters protected database) could get you in trouble.

Especially as it might not be just OSMF that is able to sue you; in some
jurisdictions it might be that all OSM contributors are co-owners of
database rights, so *any* of them might sue you (and win).

-- 
Opinions above are GNU-copylefted.





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