[OSM-legal-talk] legal FAQ license

[Francis Davey]

On 14 October 2010 07:42, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>
> Any edit made by a robot - e.g. one that fixes spelling mistakes - certainly
> qualifies for "never be considered for copyright" because copyright needs
> humans to do something; I'm not sure about database right though.
>

I've not been following the detail of this discussion. One of my
worries is that a lot of things are said - maybe off-hand - that turn
into assumptions that feed into later discussion. Since this is an
area of law (database/copyright) in which I practice I suppose I'm
rather sensitive to misconceptions, but it does concern me that OSM
might be making its policies based on what a bunch of people think,
having chewed the matter over on a mailing list and without formal
legal advice (and my contributions to the list aren't that - I'm not
instructed by OSMF).

For example, its quite possible that crowd-sourced data is jointly the
database right of all contributors. That's a possible reading of the
directive (and not an unreasonable one at that). If that were the
case, it would be impossible to slice up contributions into those made
by individuals and consider each contribution to see whether
sufficient investment of resources was made for that contribution for
it to attract database right protection.

Frederick's point above is what has spurred me to say something: its
simply incorrect to reason that a robot's contribution cannot attract
copyright. Of course it can in principle. Copyright recognises the
"computer generated work". For example if I write a clever program
that produces neat fractal pictures (say Julia sets) then those
pictures would attract copyright protection as artistic works, though
the copyright would not necessarily belong to me (it would depend how
they were created).

The test would (as always) be one of originality (which is a pretty
low bar in English copyright). A robot that changes the spelling of
one word throughout probably fails the test, but its not a general
rule about robots.

As to database right, all that is required is that a person "takes the
initiative" in causing the relevant investment of resources. Running a
CPU (and therefore cost) intensive robot could certainly qualify.
Again, probably not in this case, but there's no exclusion for robots
necessarily.

-- 
Francis Davey