[OSM-legal-talk] Legal or not? user srpskicrv and source = TOPO 25 VGI BEOGRAD

Francis Davey fjmd1a at gmail.com
Sun Oct 3 09:41:00 BST 2010


On 2 October 2010 23:29,  <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
> I think that the argument is not that.
> The argument is really
> 'Is the Serbian government the legal successor of the Yugoslav government
> in Serbian territories?'
> Would an international court give the rights to the Serbian government?
> I think that there is a possibility either way - that the copyright could
> have expired with the dissolution of the Yugoslav government - or - that
> on Serbian territory the rights to Yugoslav government went to Serbia.

I'm not sure that is the right question and, to that extent, I suspect
that much of this conversation is a red herring (although it may be
interesting). In particular I doubt there is any truly international
court which would have any jurisdiction that was in any useful way
binding on national courts.

If (say) Serbia were to use OSMF or an OSM user in London, the local
court would have to decide whether - as a matter of UK copyright law -
Serbia were entitled to a copyright in the maps/data/whatever and if
so whether it could be enforced. The Berne Convention requires that we
afford the same protection to foreign copyrights as we do our own, so
a court in England might well decide that Serbia could enforce these
copyrights. Ditto pretty much any court in any country that was a
signatory to the Convention.

Of course there are massive caveats here: there might be no copyright
in the data; no-one might bother to sue anyway (I've no idea how
aggressively Serbia would try to enforce rights it believed it had).
I'm just looking at the specific question of Serbia.

As far as I know no-one has objected to either the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia's declaration of succession to the Berne Convention in June
2001 or Serbia's declaration of continuation in September 2006, but I
rarely have to deal with this kind of cross-border issue in my work,
so I haven't looked into the question thoroughly.

A final note: the fact that the maps are *of* a country other than
Serbia has no relevance whatsoever to the general question of
copyright ownership. Countries do not "own" data about their geography
under the Berne Convention or any WIPO treaty.

It may be that the law of Yugoslavia did contain such a restriction.
If that is so, I don't know about it.

-- 
Francis Davey



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