[Talk-us] Amazon's Organized College Campus Editing

[Ian Dees]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 4:28 PM Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 2:57 PM Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In the US, it's acceptable to capture factual information (like building
>> names, where a road is, phone numbers, websites etc.) from publicly posted
>> information.
>>
> I am not a lawyer (perhaps you are Ian, I forget your background), but my
> understanding is that while facts cannot be copyrighted, collections of
> facts can be.  So copying all, or a substantial amount, of the information
> from another map could be problematic.  In addition, my understanding is
> that there are also other ways of protecting such intellectual property
> other than copyright, such as licensing.   Any clarification as to your
> sources and reasoning would be helpful for my understanding.
>

I am not a lawyer and usually try very hard not to be an armchair lawyer,
but this is a pretty fundamental thing that we should be clear about and
has fairly settled and relatively easy-to-understand case law to point to.

[0] sums it up fairly nicely, but facts are not copyrightable because there
is no creativity in producing them. Compilations of facts are also not
copyrightable, but copyright might apply to the "expression" of that
collection.

For example, you'll often see recipes in a fancy book with pictures and
unique content before and after the actual recipe. That's because the
recipe itself is not copyrightable but the arrangement and artistic style
of the book it's contained in *are* copyrightable. The most important
reading for this is Feist v. Rural [1], where the Supreme Court clarified
what compilations get copyright protections.

In the situation described in the original post of this thread, mappers are
taking publicly available, factual information from a campus website and
collecting it into OpenStreetMap. While the university might be able to
claim copyright on the artistic style or representation of the facts (the
map or diagram itself), the facts themselves are not copyrightable and can
be used freely.

This differs from Europe, where a relatively recent "European Database
Directive" [2] treats collections of facts differently.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Compilations_of_facts_and_the_sweat_of_the_brow_doctrine
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation#Feist_v._Rural_(1991)
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation#The_European_Union_Database_Directive_(1996)
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