[OSM-talk] Business listings

[Stephen Hope]

2009/7/28 John Smith <delta_foxtrot at yahoo.com>:
>
> In Australia in Telstra won a lawsuit against people OCR'ing the street directory and selling white/yellow pages on CD. For all intents and purposes Telstra owns the copyright on all Australian White/Yellow page directories and now Telstra is a publicly listed company.

A similar lawsuit (on TV program listings) was appealed earlier this
year, and got the opposite result.  It's a lot more complicated now,
but in some situations you can get away with it.  Basically the judge
said that sweat of the brow did not a copyright make - so a collection
of facts can't be copyrighted, thought the presentation of those facts
can.  There was some commentary at the time that this affected the
Telstra rulings earlier, though as far as I know nobody has tried to
do anything about it.  I'd want to talk to a lawyer about it before I
tried. And I don't know if the TV company counter appealed at a higher
level.

> Also in Australia it's not free to list in the yellow pages for anyone, it's free to be listed in the white pages though I think.

Um, that's not quite accurate.  Everybody who has a "business" phone
line, as opposed to a residential one, gets one free simple listing in
the yellow pages, under the main category for your company.  If you
don't have a business line, or want more listings under other
categories, or a bigger add, or even just bold or coloured print, then
it costs. It's actually to YP's benefit to list as many as possible,
because then people are more likely to pay more for a bigger add to
stand out.

The company I work for has never paid for a listing, and would like to
get rid of the one free one, as we don't get customers that way and
the only people who call us from it aren't actually looking for what
we do. YP won't remove it, though.

Stephen