[OSM-legal-talk] Question about copyrighted hiking routes in France

[Paul Norman]

> From: Pieren [mailto:pieren3 at gmail.com]
> Subject: [OSM-legal-talk] Question about copyrighted hiking routes in
> France
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm submitting here a question about the legality of keeping French long
> hiking routes called "GR" or "GRP" or "PR"  in OSM. All these routes are
> very well known, have sign posts and references on the ground, e.g. the
> "GR20" in Corsica (but many are still missing or very incomplete in
> OSM). See these examples in [1a] and [1b]. These routes have been
> created by the national hiking sport federation (FFRP, Fédération
> Française de Randonnée Pédestre). You can see them on the ground by the
> trail marks visible at regular intervals but also on most of the
> commercial maps in France.
> 
> But we are facing two legal issues in France. The problems are not new
> but become more critical in my opinion (see below).
> First issue : it is the hiking route names themselves. For all of them
> created by the FFRP, the names are registered trademarks and cannot be
> used without permission (see question below). 

I cannot see that indicating that there are signs with a particular text on
the ground is infringing their trademark. I'd expect most name=* values on
POIs in OSM to be a trademark (although not necessarily registered). I've
tagged Coca-Cola bottling centers, Starbucks, McDonalds and many more
objects with trademarked names. If the mapping is accurate then the
trademarked name is being used accurately and there's no issue. If I started
tagging every coffee shop as a Starbucks regardless of ownership then I'd be
diluting their trademark and it'd be an issue.

Similarly, their trademark would stop someone from creating another hiking
route with the same name, but would not stop someone from saying that they
were heading to hike the GR20 if that's in fact what they were planning to
do.

> Second issue : it is maybe a more specific French issue here because the
> "routes" themselves can be copyrighted when they are considered as
> "original work". A famous case confirmed this with the IGN (publishing
> the FFRP maps) sueing a guidebook editor [5] and confirmed by the
> highest court in France (1ere chambre de la cour de cassation de Paris,
> decision of 30 june 1998 [8]. I don't know if this is the same in other
> countries but a significant part of the OSM community in France would
> consider deleting the FFRP hiking routes completely (and not only the
> trademarks mentionned in Q1).

If the facts on the ground are covered by copyright I cannot see how a
hiking network is different than a road network or a cycle network.
Accepting this would require removing all roads in new suburbs and
developments because they were copyrighted, not just these hiking routes.

I also wonder if the guidebook copied FFRP maps or sent people out with
GPSes. Another subtle point is we don't map what FFRP says is the route, we
map what is marked on the ground.

> Personnaly, I think that a route is not considered as an "original work"
> (or not enough original) in many jurisdictions. But still, keeping them
> in OSM is raising a legal insecurity in all DB extracts stored or
> distributed on French servers or applications. For these reasons, all
> FFRP hiking routes (represented in OSM by relations of type "route",
> "route=hiking") in France should be completely removed from the OSM
> database. What do you think ?

In some countries publishing maps requires a permit, but if someone deleted
all the data in those countries I'm sure we'd regard it as vandalism. Other
countries (e.g. China) forbid maps contrary to official ones, but when
people start edit wars over disputed areas claimed by those countries what
is regarded as important is the ground truth, not what the laws of that
country allow to be published.

I don't see that a French court's judgment should determine what goes in
OSM, any more than a Chinese court. Even if the French court believes they
have jurisdiction, they'd have to get any judgment domesticated by a British
court. To accept the French judgment would gut OSM because it would apply to
every hiking or road network in France, or for that matter, outside of
France.