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

Steve Bennett stevagewp at gmail.com
Fri Feb 22 03:11:41 GMT 2013


On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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). Second issue : the
> routes themselves are copyrighted.

Hi Pieren,
  I am also not a lawyer, but here's my two cents. First, it would be
really said if we lost the GR routes. I recently hiked about half of
the GR20, using the OSM route of course. So I don't think we should
give up easily - they're so valuable.

On the trademark front, it should be easy to establish if they have a
genuine complaint. If they do, I think we can change the names without
losing too much - even if had to call them "French hiking route 20" or
something.

> 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).

On what basis do they claim ownership of the routes, exactly? As I
understand it, many of these routes link up lots of little trails that
had been around for decades. How did copyright get transferred from
the people who created the trails to the FFRP? Or do they claim
ownership only over new sections? Or only over a particular
representation?

Are they aware that all the data has been created independently, by
surveying the trail - not by actually copying their data?

I wonder where the exact line would be drawn - what if we didn't have
"routes", but just the trails marked. But then, how would you label
such a trail - often they have no other name other than the GR number,
plus the name of the next landmark.

Presumably someone has sought French legal advice? What was it?

Steve



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