[OSM-legal-talk] license change effect on un-tagged nodes

John Smith deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 6 19:31:01 BST 2011


On 6 July 2011 18:20, ce-test, qualified testing bv - Gert Gremmen
<g.gremmen at cetest.nl> wrote:
> [<GG>] I was not talking about copyright. Copyright laws are of no use
> in the digital era,

You were talking about databases, however databases can still store
copyrightable content, in this case it's copyright that we're talking
about, if copyright weren't an issue the database could just be
relicensed, but there is copyright involved so it can't.

> their application is too large and too wide, and information can be
> copied without loss.

So what, copyright still covers creative works.

> The application of copyright law is expensive and full of pitfalls.
> See what happens with movies and mp3 on P2P networks.
> These are outdated legal texts, and have to be redefined.

This is irrelevant, just because it's difficult to enforce, doesn't
make it less enforcible.

>> In creating tiles "the map" I agree. Not in creating a database.
>
> In terms of copyright, it doesn't matter how a map is stored or how it
> is displayed, it's the act of making it that matters and because there
> is human involvement that's all that matters.
>
> [<GG>] Is that true ???
>
> I would reformulate that as follows:
>
> "In terms of copyright, it doesn't matter how a map is stored or how it
> is displayed, it's the act of human coordinated creativity that
> matters."

Copyright covers any work you do, no matter how trivial or how small,
weather you intend to do something worth copyright or not.
Photographers keep winning in court over companies that using their
imagery without attribution and sometimes without paying for it.

> Not the mere fact that there are humans involved makes it copyrighted.
>
>
> I think you agree with me that software is copyrighted due to the
> algorithms implemented,  a proof of effort and creativity.
> It's not the output of the software that is copyrighted by the writer
> of the software, but the source code. The output can be copyrighted,
> if created by copyrighted input.

Didn't bison do something weird with licensing, where it was
interacting with the output and including a chunk of itself the output
was deemed to be copyrighted under the same license, in any case this
is all pointless, we're not talking about survey's if you want a
similar example use wikipedia, the content is copyrighted even though
the it's stored in a database.


> OSM is the same. We have a set of algorithms and 200K+ human CPUs that
> as

Not really, OSM doesn't produce anything, any more than MS can claim
copyright on the output of word, the author of the document owns the
copyright.



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