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

[Mike Thompson]

Thanks Ian, very much appreciated, and useful.

This might help when a city or state won't say what license their GIS data
is released under.

Mike

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 3:48 PM Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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