[Openstreetmap] Re: Coders needed for similar project & UK FOIactrequest update.

[Lars Aronsson]

Alex Mauer wrote:

> How can these simple facts be copyrightable!?

An introduction is given in the Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rights

It is a fact that "database rights" are now a part of copyright 
law.  As Wikipedia says: "The policy disallows copying of 
substantial parts of a database (including frequent extraction of 
insubstantial parts) and in that respect is similar to copyright."

However, this still leaves some room for interpretation of the 
concept (for example, how much is "substantial parts"?) in 
national legislation, case law, and rights owners' eagerness to 
litigate.  The British Ordnance Survey seems to be of the more 
aggressive kind.

In any case, printed or bitmap rendered maps are covered by 
traditional copyright for 70 years (or 50 years in the case of UK 
Crown copyright), but database rights are only protected for 15 
years. So you might get away with screen scraping Google Maps now 
and publishing the data in the year 2021.  During the 15 years in 
between, if the infringement is "substantial", the rights to the 
derived database could belong to Google and/or TeleAtlas.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se