[OSM-talk] GPX tracing out of copyright maps

[Nick Burch]

On Mon, 13 Nov 2006, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> That suggests that the best way for any company to maximise the length 
> of copyright protection is to employ five-year olds to make tiny 
> corrections to their maps, thereby ensuring around 140 years of 
> protection.

Child labour laws might have something to say on that! If you had the 
money to take it to court, you could probably argue that the 14 year old 
saturday job kid they had work on the map didn't do enough creative work 
to qualify for copyright protections on their contribution. Bit hard to 
prove either way 100 years later though...

> This is clearly a very silly law. Please someone tell me I've got it 
> wrong.

I don't think you have. Until fairly recently, copyright law was very 
dull, and almost never affected normal people. So, laws were lobbied for 
only by big publishers, and author/musician/etc groups.

It's only now that normal people are doing enough creating _and_ 
distributing of derived works (mostly online) that we're all coming into 
contact with copyright law, and discovering just how stacked against us it 
was made while we weren't paying any attention to it :(

Nick