[OSM-talk] Maps and names

[Lars Aronsson]

Andy Robinson wrote:

> Can you use the same argument as for a book?
> 
> If I copy a word or even words from a book that is just copying 
> fact is it not?

I think this would be an insufficient analogy for understanding 
how copyright and database rights work for (digital) maps.  But 
anyhow, the example of extracting facts from a printed book can be 
interesting in itself.  It is a common practice for 3rd parties to 
compile and publish alphabetic indexes to books that lack those. 
The most familiar example must be the Bible, where there is a 
whole genre of literature that tries to identify which part of the 
Old Testament made a prophecy of each event in the New Testament, 
and which people or concepts appear in which book, chapter, and 
verse.  Publishing such 3rd party indexes and analyses is allowed 
(and common!) even if the analyzed source text is copyrighted.

In principle, it must also be allowed to publish a street name 
index to someone else's printed street map, regardless of the 
copyright to the map.  I don't know how common this is, though.  
It could be worth trying.

However, for a digital map, the list of names and their position 
on the map (the street name index) in the *shape of a list* is 
often directly a part of the copyrighted digital map.  Compiling a 
3rd party index of names becomes indistinguishable from copying 
the same list from within the digital map.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what case law exists in this 
grey area, but I think it is interesting to observe that Geonet 
and Wikipedia apparently copy large numbers of positions without 
getting hurt by map providers such as Google or TeleAtlas.


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