[OSM-talk] Illegal activity

[Anthony]

On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> in some regions/countries like the EU there is also a database protection
> and those aerial images are / might be considered a database.

Those database laws really make things tough.  It's basically a flaw in the law.

Yes, a collection of aerial images is a database.  But a single aerial
image is probably not.  Does the fact that an aerial image was once
part of a database really taint the use of that image forever?  If so,
you can stretch that to absurdity.  A collection of Shakespeare poems
is a database.  Does that mean that copying a poem from a Shakespeare
poem database and putting it in Wikisource is copyright infringement?
What if 100 other people do the same thing with the same database?
What if 200 people do the same thing from 10 different databases?

It's a ludicrous law in the first place if it can be applied to
hand-tracing a small number of aerial images.