[OSM-legal-talk] 'Contents'

[Francis Davey]

On 5 May 2011 15:40, Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com> wrote:
>
> From a user's point of view, a safe strategy is to assume that 'contents' is
> empty and that everything in the map is licensed under ODbL.  But it's possible
> that the 'contents', which are covered by the DbCL rather than the ODbL, might
> be something meaningful.

Yes, indeed. And who knows? Even our Court of Appeal (of England and
Wales) is not entirely sure, which is why it referred questions to the
ECJ about what (if any) intellectual property rights there were in
football fixtures lists.

An (English) court might well find that parts of or all of the map
were some or many artistic works and hence subject to copyright or it
might think that some of the words in the map were literary works
(unlikely, but I don't know what's there - its a big map), or that
(perhaps) each way was a compilation along the lines of the old
compilation cases or some similar form of literary work and therefore
subject to copyright.

Or the ways themselves might be databases subject to database
copyright or they might be another kind of work (assuming that Infopaq
has destroyed the division of copyright into kinds of work that
English law adopts) etc.

Really, who knows. I'd certainly happily take instructions to argue
either way on all these points, as I'm sure lots of other IP lawyers
would.

But whatever might be that position, it looks likely that there is
also a database (subject to database right) of the bits that make up
the map, whether or not there are any other IP rights.

Other jurisdictions may (of course) vary, though Europe less so.

-- 
Francis Davey