[OSM-legal-talk] Does importing data give you a copyright?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    with my eyes firmly on the upcoming license change, I wonder how we 
are going to deal with people who have imported data which is suitable 
from a license point of view, but whom we cannot reach or who do not 
agree to the CT.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Dave Hansen (who ran the 
TIGER import) wouldn't agree to the CT. I know he has agreed already, 
I'm just using this as a what-if example.

The original TIGER data is PD, so there's no license problem with 
keeping it. But Dave certainly has invested a lot of time in planning 
and executing the import, and he has certainly created copyrightable 
software in the process, thinking of how to match features in the 
original data to OSM tags and so on.

We know that facts are very unlikely to be protected by CC-BY-SA in the 
US, no matter how many times you convert them into something else, but 
let's assume for a moment that Dave was operating out of Europe.

Would his act of converting and uploading public domain data to OSM give 
him rights in that data, so that we'd have to remove it if he does not 
agree to the CT? Or do we say "PD data is PD data, no matter what the 
person uploading it to OSM says"?

It may be even easier to think about this if one splits the process into 
two steps - person A masterfully creates a piece of data conversion 
software, then person B installs that software, grabs a PD dataset, and 
hits a button on the software. Who "owns" the resulting data in OSM? A, 
who devised the algorithms? B, who pushed the button and used his 
computing time and network bandwidth? Both? Neither?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"