[OSM-talk] Maps and names

[Etienne]

On 9/3/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> 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.


Not yet anyway.  But then they are not using the data to make something that
competes with their core business.

It probably makes a big difference if the copying is small scale or large
scale.  If 3,000 different users all add one Ordnance Survey sourced name to
OSM then that is probably no different from one user adding 3,000 names.
The latter would almost certainly be copyright infringing and I'm sure a
good lawyer could argue that the former is the same.

Here's an acid test.  If you copy a name from a map (or remember the name
from earlier looking at a map) would you be prepared to attribute the source
in OSM using the source:name tag?  If you do this then OSM would be able to
easily remove the offending data when/if the time comes.

Admittedly this would make it easy for TeleAtlas to see if we are using
their data, but if we are we should do it openly and honestly - it shouldn't
be anyone's intention to infringe copyright and just "get away with it"
because the victim cannot see that it has happened.  We are all honest here
and have the best intentions.  Lets strive to work to the highest possible
standards.

Etienne



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