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

[80n]

Dave Hanson relicensed the TIGER data under CC-BY-SA when he contributed it
to OSM.  If you received it from him you have to comply with his license
terms.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
>
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