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

[Simon Poole]

Am 07.06.2015 um 22:56 schrieb Christoph Hormann:
...
> *Individual* facts are never an issue, neither under copyright nor 
> database rights, it only becomes a problem w.r.t. database rights once 
> you systematically transfer data on a larger scale.  In other words a 
> single source=wikipedia is not a problem, it only becomes an issue when 
> it occurs in larger numbers.  It is of course somewhat difficult to 
> draw the line here. 

Yes that is the problem.

>                   But no mapper should feel required to refrain from 
> looking into wikipedia while mapping IMO or ban copyrighted books from 
> his/her library out of fear for license problems.
> 

The difficulty is even -if- every mapper only ever copied "one
individual fact" from a source into OSM, for the lack of a better
example lets say google, which in isolation would be unproblematic, it
is extremely unlikely that a court would consider that unconnected to
500'000 other mappers doing the same.

I would suspect that any court worth its salt would always consider the
OSM contributors as one entity and any substantial vs. non-substantial
considerations to always consider the complete body of data from the
same source.

Now while this is naturally just speculation, most of the times courts
try to avoid creating gigantic legal loopholes and it is unlikely that
they would rule an activity illegal for one entity, legal for many just
because the Internet makes it possible to split it up over a very large
number of people.

Simon

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