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

Matija Nalis mnalis-news at voyager.hr
Sun Oct 3 23:26:53 BST 2010


On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 09:41:00 +0100, Francis Davey <fjmd1a at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 October 2010 23:29,  <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
>> The argument is really
>> 'Is the Serbian government the legal successor of the Yugoslav government
>> in Serbian territories?'
>
> 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;

Well, ex-Yugoslavia (as well as todays Serbia) were/are both Berne
convention signatories.  The maps in question are from 1970s it seems, 
and copyright in YU was 70 years AFAIR at the time the YU falled.

So all singnatories to Berne convention should be still protecting that 
works. Now, if I understand you correctly, you propose 2 scenarions:

a) if it is likely that Serbia is successor to Yugoslavia, that the
   maps in question are still protected (unless Serbia relinquieshed
   copyright on them, which AFAIK it didn't), or

b) if the Serbia is not successor to Yugoslavia (at least in the matter of
   aforementioned copyright on maps), than that maps may be out of
   copyright.

While I agree with (a), the (b) does not seem right to me. IMHO, if Serbia
is not accepted as successor to Yugoslavia (and the matter was not resolved
by succession), then the copyright owner is "missing" - and should behave
like any other case of missing or unknown copyright owner (for example, if
author without successors died; or if the work was under pseudonym and never
reveled). 

And that behaviour is, to the best of my knowledge, that the copyright work
remains protected with "all rights reserved" (only practical difference
being that potential users now have 0% chance of buying rights from owner
anymore, as she's gone). (At least it looks so in Croatian copyright law
which is mostly the same as the ex-Yugoslav/Serbian one. Are you perhaps
arguing that under UK law if the copyright owner is not known or is not
proactively suing copyright breakers, one can legaly copy copyrighted works,
and is not in vioalation until he receives and ignores "cease and desist"
letter ?)

> no-one might bother to sue anyway (I've no idea how
> aggressively Serbia would try to enforce rights it believed it had).

Uh, that one ("are the chances we won't be caught breaking law low enough
today?") should not be the way to handle this (or similar) issues, IMHO.

Unauthorized copying of copyrighted works is illegal. The possibly high
chances that copyright owners might not notice or might not be bothered 
to sue ATM does not make it legal.


-- 
Opinions above are GNU-copylefted.




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