[OSM-talk] Cracking the Secret Codes of Europe's Galileo Satellite

[Barry Hunter]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Emil Vaughan" <emil79 at gmail.com>
> On 7/12/06, Dean Earley <dean at earlsoft.co.uk> wrote:
>> > "The Europeans cannot copyright basic data about the physical world" -
>> > the ordnance survey thinks it can......... :)
>>
>> As I understand it, their represntation of it (the rendering) is 
>> copyright
>> AS WELL AS the "creative" parts they put in to protect their hard work 
>> and
>> stop people stealing it. This is why we can't blindly copy them.
>>
>>
>
> No-one would question that their rendering is copyright, but they also
> claim that if you copy street names from one of their maps you are
> making a derivative work. This is what I was referring to.
>
> Emil

To copy a street name from their map, you are not just copying the name (and 
the work that went into finding that name), but also their interpretation of 
where the road is. Even if you are not coping the exact coordinates, there 
is still a relationship.

Think about it another way, if you copy a street name from a map to label 
your GPS trace, and they got the road name wrong, then so would your map be, 
so you have copied their map.

It's as much the research that went into making the maps that the copyright 
is protecting as much as the maps themselves. OS maps have on the order of 
Millions (if not more) of man-hours invested in their creation.

Drawing on a discussion a while back about county borders, and the OS 
claiming copyright on them, quite simply if you want to copy from their 
files then would be infringement, even though the data is represents a fact 
it is still a representation that took time to compile.

Barry