[OSM-talk] (licence of wikidata) was: Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Sun Jun 7 19:37:49 UTC 2015


On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 12:40 AM, SomeoneElse <lists at atownsend.org.uk> wrote:

> However the bit that I really don't understand is that, to take an example
> wikidata page:
>
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23098
>
> the source of that is from other, non-CC0-licensed places - how can the
> result be CC0?
>

Because in US copyright law, facts are not copyrightable. You can source
the fact that "Washington, D.C." is the "capital of the United States of
America" from a copyrighted book without that fact inheriting the copyright
license of the book.

Note that the US does not have database rights. The relevant case is Feist
v. Rural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc
.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.
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