[OSM-legal-talk] [talk-au] Statement from nearmap.com regarding submission of derived works from PhotoMaps to OpenStreetMap

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 06/17/11 16:39, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> 1. IIRC the newer versions of CC-By-SA include statements to ensure
> that the content is not protected by database rights, patents or DRM,
> which would prevent their uses.

News to me. Do you have a pointer?

It is true that CC-BY-SA, for as long as I can think, has had a section 
that said something like you may not slap on restrictions that diminish 
the rights granted by the license, or something. That was meant against 
DRM, or against a simple "I sell you this CC-BY-SA map tile but only if 
you sign the additional contract here that says you may not distribute 
it" or so.

But that applied only the the rights granted by the license; and the 
rights granted by the license were basically to do stuff that is 
normally restricted by *copyright*.

Stuff that is normally restricted by patents (for example) was never 
covered by CC-BY-SA in the first place, so the "you may not add 
restrictions" rule didn't apply.

> 2. What happens if a person in country A with database rights
> publishes a tileset and licenses it under CC-By-SA to a person in
> country B without database rights?  The second person is then as far
> as I can see not bound by database rights or a contract.  Is that
> incorrect?

This is a difficult issue and I am in no way certain, but the reverse 
engineering discussion has at the very least brought the result that you 
cannot "wash away" database right by going via another country, i.e. if 
you take something to which database rights apply in Europe, then go to 
the US and publish it there as PD, then someone else from Europe takes 
the US product, then the database rights will magically reappear, i.e. 
even though something could legally be PD in the US, someone in Europe 
might be prohibited from using it.

Bye
Frederik