[Openstreetmap] public domain in USA

Frank Mohr f_mohr at yahoo.de
Tue Dec 13 12:07:21 GMT 2005


Immanuel Scholz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>I have a boatload of very high resolution aerials of the Southern
>>Indiana and North Central Kentucky Area.  These are public domain and
>>are already geo-referenced.  How do I go about getting these added to
>>the OSM dataset?
> 
> 
> I assume they are public domain because made by government people living
> in the USA?
> 
> I already wanted to ask the "legal department" of OSM: Are information
> (e.g. maps), which are public domain within the USA are allowed as
> reference to draw a map in OSM with? As copyright is a national law, some
> countries does not have a "public domain" at all (germany) and stuff that
> is public domain in countries may not be in other countries.
> 
> As example, german wikipedia allows such pictures to be used, but remindes
> that the legal status of this documents outside the USA is not that
> crystal clear.. It has a special copyright tag for this public-domain-data
> ("free because made of a gouvernment within USA"), maybe because they can
> easily delete all this data if the legal status turns out to be
> copyrighted outside the USA? Maybe not?
> 
> Any comments? (My comment is: allow them.)

that would be a good question for http://www.ifross.de/
"Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software"
they also did the german and austrian CC adaptions

i met one of them at the last Linuxtag and we discussed
a special licence for geodata
(but only with the result that he proposed to use a
"known" licence like CC or GPL that fits best until
the is a special licence)

frank

	

	
		
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