[OSM-talk] Soviet military maps copyright status

[Andy Robinson]

Kristian Thy wrote: 
>Sent: 17 January 2007 9:30 AM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Soviet military maps copyright status
>
>On Tue, Jan 16, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>> Ok. As long as you don't mind that this really is just my opinion:
>>
>> 1. Copyright of Russian material (even discounting the UK stuff -
>> covered well at jomidav.com) is so heavily disputed, and the countries
>> of the former USSR so unpredictable in their governance, that there is
>> without doubt a strong element of risk.
>
>Agreed.
>
>> 2. A proper source tag is a Good Thing, but nonetheless, some thought
>> is still required; people may end up basing significant quantities of
>> work on items which have to be removed.
>
>That is also a concern of mine. However, if people update segments from
>the ones digitalized from the map with information from a gps track,
>they would also "remove" any copyright infringement, right? Because the
>data is no longer based on the map, but on their gps track.
>

In theory I would agree with you, however unless you properly tag each
previously created map element with the reference to the new source there is
no way to differentiate and only remove the elements which are still based
on the infringed data. 


>> It's therefore especially interesting to read the Georgia PDF cited in
>> the Wikipedia flame
>>
>(http://www.cipr.org/legal_reference/countries/georgia/Georgia_Copyright_EN
>G.pdf).
>> I think that would give us/a lawyer enough grounds to come to a
>> decision on using Soviet maps of Georgia. Note in particular:
>>
>> II.5.3. "Copyright does not apply to ideas, methods, processes,
>> systems, means, concepts, principles, discoveries and facts, even if
>> they are expressed, described, explained, illustrated or embodies in a
>> work"
>>
>> but then there's a whole host of relevant, and possibly contradictory,
>> stuff in II.6 (particularly points 1.j, 1.k, 1.l, 2 and 3).
>
>"1.m) Other works." Duh :)
>
>I note that 1.j only states that maps are covered by the clause in
>II.5.3., and 1.k pertains to literary and art works in particular. 1.l
>covers compilations, but we're not exactly building an encyclopaedia or
>other compilation work in that sense.
>
>> Other ex-USSR states have similar PDFs on the same site:
>> http://www.cipr.org/legal_reference/countries/ . I'd suggest these as
>> starting points.
>
>As noted in the Wikipedia flamewar, Georgia apparently has the strictest
>copyright laws of the successor states, so if we're good with that the
>other ex-states shouldn't be a problem. Where's our resident lawyer? ;)
>
>> On a separate point: FWIW, Bridgeman vs Corel is not universally
>> accepted by legal experts in the UK. _However_ neither is it
>> necessarily directly relevant for what we're talking about here.
>> Bridgeman vs Corel covered reproductions of an out-of-copyright work,
>> not derivations of the factual information expressed in that work. The
>> copyright status of a facsimile of an artistic work may not
>> necessarily determine the copyright status of the facts related in
>> that work.
>
>I mentioned Bridgeman vs Corel in connection with the legal status of
>the map files as downloaded from poehali.org, not the maps themselves.
>Poehali is US-based, which I guess means that they can't claim copyright
>on the *files* even though they've watermarked them.
>
>Thanks for the insightful comments!
>
>\\kristian
>--
>Cthulhu.call();
>
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Cheers

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk