[Osmf-talk] Copyright in the Digital Single Market

[Jaak Laineste]

> On 13 Sep 2018, at 15:47, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> sent from a phone
> 
>> On 13. Sep 2018, at 09:46, Oleksiy Muzalyev <oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch> wrote:
>> 
>> there is the text instead of the illustration photo: "Bâtiment soumis au droit d'auteur", in English it means: "Building subject to copyright". The owner of this building for some reason does not want it to be photographed.
> 
> 
> it is not the owner but the architect who has the copyright on the building.

OT really, but (why) doesn't any sane owner of the building have agreement with the architect stating that all the material copyrights will be transferred to the one who has paid for the job? Just as programmer/employee may have the authorship or 'moral' rights (which in my country are not transferrable by law), but all the commercial rights and rights to modify would be transferred by contact, or even automatically by law, to the employer.

I know the logic is that creative or artistic works are traditionally more owned and controlled by the artist, and architecture (also music, books, movies) is considered more of an 'art' than technical work like writing software code. And there is some logic in it. However, should secondary/tertiary representations of the art like photo of a building, or digital representation of the footprint of the building in the OSM somehow controlled by the original artist? General logic should be that if the copy serves original purpose - e.g. copy of painting is also used as decoration, copy of entertaining text is used as entertaining text, building design is re-created as new building etc, then this should be controllable by original author with licensing/permissions/whatever, but if this is secondary copy serves different purpose, then not. This is how I would state in the laws, but I'm not the lawmaker here :)

Specifically the EU law states about filters: "Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate". My common sense understanding is that OSM does have "appropriate and proportionate" measures in place since long time, technically it means tools to remove challenged data when data owner shows that this was their copyright. Filtering road/building shapes during data import/upload using some magic tools for automatic copyright violation detection would be clearly outside expected "appropriate and proportionate" terms. Therefore I would not be too worried about this law in the narrow OSM context. Of course, the risk that some crazy map data owner (or maybe landscape architect) would challenge our 'post-filter' approach cannot be fully eliminated, "appropriate and proportionate" is not bullet-proof term.


Jaak