[OSM-talk] License plan

[Russ Nelson]

On Feb 27, 2009, at 4:03 PM, Gustav Foseid wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net 
> > wrote:
> I think it's pretty unarguable that, in the UK, your tracing of the  
> Peruvian
> lakes would merit copyright or similar protection (as "sweat-of-the- 
> brow").
>
> Both the UK "sweat-of-the-brow" and the Norwegian (and Dutch?)  
> protection of  a large number of facts _might_ be invalid after the  
> database directive.

I think that the reason that the US only protects creativity and not  
facts is because the US doesn't want to give out a monopoly on a set  
of facts about the world.  I'm unfamiliar with how "sweat-of-the-brow"  
works.  Does it actually give a monopoly on a listing of facts?  For  
example, in the US, you could make a listing of every postcode, and  
your only claim to copyrightability would be any judgement your  
exercised on which postcodes you listed and which you chose to not  
list.  It seems like in the UK, you could do the same thing and have a  
copyright on it -- but another person could exercize the same brow- 
sweating and claim a copyright on EXACTLY the same facts.  Which then  
brings up the interesting possibility of a third party infringing two  
copyrights.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson

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