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

[Simon Poole]

Am 07.07.2011 01:40, schrieb John Smith:
> On 7 July 2011 09:34, Simon Poole<simon at poole.ch>  wrote:
>> That does not imply that individual contributors actually hold any rights in
>> the data they
>> contributed.  As we know, that is a difficult question and depends on
>> jurisdiction and so
>> on, and my take on it would be: probably not. For all practical purposes we
>> are simply
>> pretending that such rights exist and it just doesn't make sense to spend
>> hours arguing
>> about if moving a node creates a derivative work, because again -we are just
>> pretending-.
> Think that all you like, it won't make it any more true than the
> comment about copyright not really applying in the digital age, the
> fact is maps and map making are covered by copyright, and copyright is
> recognised in most countries. Otherwise we could take other
> copyrighted maps and copy them.

-Maps- are covered by copyright. But a pile of geo data is not a map, 
and I can use  it for many
many purposes with output that nobody would ever confuse with a map. 
Just as the collections of
measurements that mappers made before the dawn of computers were not a 
map, but simply
the underlying data.

Simon