[OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - publishable memo for USA

[Simon Poole]

Am 08.12.2011 15:46, schrieb Frederik Ramm:
> Hi,
>
> On 12/08/2011 02:20 PM, Ed Avis wrote:
>> They produced a written report
>
> I am intrigued by the joint authorship concept. If that was true 
> (relatively) universally, then we could perhaps use that to force even 
> those who haven't agreed to the license change to allow us (their 
> co-authors) to continue to distribute their part of the work under a 
> license we choose. At least under German copyright law, this would 
> only require us to share our profits with them, and since our profit 
> is zero, this whole issue could make the license change a breeze! 



Well the concept is not new and has been suggested before .... at least 
in a couple of the major OSM countries  have concepts of joint 
authorship (UK, Germany for example), but the consequences seem to 
differ quite a lot in the details.

But the overriding reason why this is a path best not taken is that 
"force" boils down to legal action. And while for example in Germany 
permission to change the licence could not be unreasonably withheld, you 
would still have to ask each contributor first (unlikely that no answer 
would be considered consent).

In summary I don't quite see how the report changes anything, summarized 
it states:

a) maps are copyrightable in the US (not that we didn't know that)
b) online maps are copyrightable in the US (we assumed that too)
c) you could make a case that the underlying data of an online map is 
copyrightable (which we assume to some point for style files and 
similar... for the actually geographic data it is probably just speculation)
d) we need a set of contributor terms that control the relationship 
between the mappers and the OSMF (very novel suggestion ... one could 
argue that the current CTs don't really cover all relevant points but 
that is a different discussion)

Simon