[Openstreetmap] London locations

[Lars Aronsson]

Richard Fairhurst wrote:

> TeleAtlas (who provide the relevant Google mapping), and 
> potentially _their_ suppliers (which most probably means 
> Ordnance Survey), have database right in the gazetteer used to 
> draw placenames on the Google map. This is the big database 
> table which contains information like your Glasgow lat/long for 
> every single town and village in the country, and OS sell this 
> as a commercial product.

Ah, yes, now you are talking database rights.  That kind of 
protection is valid if I copy a larger number of facts, but not if 
I copy a single piece of information (a single coordinate).  
Furthermore, I must copy the information, at least down to a few 
decimal places.  If I just look at the map and estimate the 
coordinates, I'm not copying the informations in the database.

If you can provide me with a U.K. court case where database rights 
have been claimed and *upheld* in a broader sense than this, I'd 
be interested.

Furthermore, database rights expire sooner than the life+70 years 
term that is valid for copyright.  I think they expire 15 years 
after publication in Sweden, but I'm not sure how it can vary 
between countries.

> "A person infringes database right in a database if, without the 
> consent of the owner of the right, he extracts or re-utilises 
> all or a substantial part of the contents of the database." 

"All or substantial part" and "extracts or re-utilises" are 
important phrases here.  They do not apply if I *estimate* one or 
a few coordinates, which is what we're talking about here.

The really interesting case, that will prove if "database rights" 
lawyers can out-think the Internet generation, or if it is the 
other way around, is this: If I copy just a few facts from some 
database, and you copy just a few other facts from the same 
database, and thousands of us come together at a fact swap-fest, 
will the resulting smorgasbord of facts constitute an infringement 
of the database rights?  We should call this test ... "Wikipedia".

> Daniel's point about electoral boundaries is a useful one. Those 
> electoral boundaries are derived works, too. They've mostly been 
> obtained by drawing lines on an Ordnance Survey map, which is 
> copyrighted. For the local council, there's absolutely no 
> problem in this, because they get their OS mapping free through 
> the Pan-Governmental Agreement. It just hobbles any of the rest 
> of us wanting to do good works with it.

So are there any U.K. court cases where the O.S. has defended 
their claims of copyright to electoral boundaries?

Electoral boundaries are just a list (database) of coordinates, so 
they cannot be covered by traditional copyright, but they can be 
subject to database rights.  Do electoral boundaries change more 
often than database rights expire?  (Say, 15 years.)


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