Talk:Legal FAQ
From OpenStreetMap
Why is it illegal to copy other data
I understand that for works of art, they are protected by copyright, however a map is a collection of facts. Facts are not copyrightable. For discussion see 499 U.S. 340 (A supreme court case where copying records from a phonebook (including bogus marking records) was not illegal. While I am unaware of international law, is it true that facts are not copyrightable internationally? (Is this a bern convention thing?)
- "Facts are not copyrightable" is indeed a US viewpoint. It doesn't necessarily apply elsewhere. In addition, in the EU there's the concept of "database right" to consider. I'm currently looking up a load of case law on this and hope to have more to report soon. --Richard 11:45, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation does not own the copyright to user contributions. That part is false and should be corrected. --LA2 23:46, 21 Mar 2006 (UTC)
- I added that part because someone asked that "we should form a foundation like wikimedia that own the copyright". I know that this is wrong for germany, googled a bit in other wikis and got the impression that it could be true for en.wikipedia.org (by telling from the discussions about licensing). But I did not found any real proof. So I put that "most" in.. :-].
- So what is the status of the wikipedia? How can they do any modification in the license? Do they have to (like in germany) ask every contributor whether he agree? --Imi 09:49, 22 Mar 2006 (UTC)
- About this, I just want to say that a french court decided recently (November 2007) that Wikipedia has to be considered as a web host and not as editor. He is therefore not responsible for the comments writen by the contributors. Pieren 15:20, 10 Nov 2007
This page is a great idea to summarise and resolve the licence issue, but there are a couple of statements which are (IMHO) closer to opinion than fact: (re: a geodata licence) "CC-By-Sa is very close to this"; and (re: the spirit of the licence) "Unfortunatly, some restrictions has to be accepted to make sure of this".
I'd also be a little wary of using the word "free" - it's a fairly loaded word in licence discussions. A GPL advocate's understanding of "free" differs from a BSD advocate's, and so on.
But again, the page is a great idea, and full credit for trying to nail everything down in one place. --Richard 15:49, 22 Mar 2006 (UTC)
Attribution
What do you need to do to "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor" for OSM? (e.g. I presume we don't need to put the name of everyone whose tracklog appears on the map?)
Do we have an equivalent of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
Ojw 15:51, 28 Apr 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah I think we should look at how it works on wikipedia. On the wikipedia website itself, users have their work attributed to them on the history tab display, and also the 'my contributions' display. It's a small attribution, but it helps give individual users a sense of "I helped to build this" achievement.
- The articles are released with an open licence which requires attribution, but the most widely accepted interpretation of the GFDL license is "You may be able to partially fulfill [attribution obligations] by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article" (see Wikipedia:Copyrights#Reusers' rights and obligations). The GFDL liscence isn't clear on this point, and presumably the cc-by-sa2 license isn't either, because they're not written with multi-user community contibutions in mind, but this is the interpretation which wikipedia people have settled upon by concensus (at least among those who have taken the trouble to look into it). Presumably the exact interpretation the courts would take is still unknown. The point is, people are happy to count a link back to wikipedia as sufficient attribution, after all, anyone following this link will be able to find the history display which attributes all the users and their contributions.
- Here on OpenStreetMap we dont have a history display yet. I think this means we are technically in breach of our own license, since we aren't attributing mapping contributions. But I think it has been discussed before. We are gathering the necessary user/timestamp data, but we're just not displaying it yet, due to privacy concerns or something. I think it's something that should be added somehow. This way attribution could work the same way as in wikipedia, couldn't it? i.e we require a prominent link -- Harry Wood 13:10, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Compatibility with which licenses?
I think it would be great to add more info on the compatability issues. For Example can I take Gnu FDL licensed data? Sorry, if that is answered somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I'd appreciate info on this.--spaetz 12:41, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Copyright on extracted data
- Moved here from the article page. --inas 06:31, 3 September 2007 (BST)
- I'd be interested in legal clarification on the status of extracted data. As far as I know, statistical data (e.g. word usage data) derived from a source like wikipedia is not covered by the copyright on the corpus. It wouldn't surprise me to find there was similar legal protection/exemption for certain kinds of analyses of spatial data. But there might not be. TomC 15:53, 22 Mar 2006 (UTC)
Added disclaimer
Ok, so 21 months on, I can stop being diplomatic (see above).
This page hasn't worked out well, at all. So much of it is people's opinion; there are some opinions presented as facts here which are disputed by a very large percentage of the OSM userbase (who are, after all, the copyright holders). To claim these are definitive answers to FAQs is misleading and potentially very damaging.
I have added a disclaimer for all but the first two entries, which at least are undisputed facts. I strongly suggest that we move anything which could possibly be disputed - probably 90% of the rest - into a "Common interpretations of the licence" page to avoid giving the impression that it is fact.
--Richard 12:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
- I don't think the stuff you moved gave any hard and fast position. It mostly directed people to look at whether the resulting work was "derived" or "collective", which are the actual words used in the licence we use. I think it could still be fixed, rather than devalued to be surrounded by bold disclaimers. All of what is written on the subject is going to be somebody's opinion. --inas 22:48, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
OSM Data not copyrightable?
It was mentioned in the OpenStreetMap blog that it's possible that the OSM license (CC-BY-SA) is not valid for the reason that geographical data is considered as database data and protected by database rights in Europe, and not by copyright. The idea is, data (i.e., facts) is not copyrightable and since OSM data is data, then it can't be protected by copyright licenses like CC in the United States but could be protected by database rights in Europe, but it is currently not protected by such.
I'd like to argue that the OSM Data is actually copyrightable since there are elements of creative expression in the underlying data. For instance, the selection of which points represents the curvature of a road is arguably a creative process and is thus copyrightable. The exact shape of a road is a fact, and not copyrightable, but we do not capture that fact but instead we "create" a representation of that fact through the judicious placing of OSM points. Am I making sense here?
Unlike an alphabetic listing of phone numbers which is pure data, OSM Data is not just data and there is creative input, thus I think that the OSM Data is still copyrightable and is not in "a curious unlicensed limbo at the moment" like the blog post says.
--Seav 05:04, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
"..and all data created by use of any tools which connect to openstreetmap.org is to be licensed.."
I feel that the current statement on OSM sign-up page is incredibly wide. I guess the spirit is that everything to be uploaded to OSM is to be licensed, as well as all the derived works using OSM data. But all data by anything which happens to connect OSM.org, that includes everything done with a web browser that has been used to check out OSM front page. Does anyone else feel that this should be clarified? Why is that "all data" addition needed anyways? -- Jesh 16:17, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
- The text on the sign up page (http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/new) ? It says "By creating an account, you agree that all work uploaded to openstreetmap.org and all data created by use of any tools which connect to openstreetmap.org is to be licensed under this Creative Commons license (by-sa)."
- This text needs to be reasonably concise obviously, but I agree that it could be phrased better. -- Harry Wood 16:42, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
How should a company "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author"
Our company is thinking about using OpenStreetMap in our reports to clients. Typically, we would use a screenshot of only a section of a displayed map (not the whole web page) and place it in our report (e.g., to show the location of a site we investigated). Our policy is to comply with legal requirements. The OpenStreetMap license states:
"You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor"
Isn't OpenStreetMap created by numerous "authors"? How can we identify who they are (for a given map section we are interested in)? How do we know which manner of attribution they specified? Is attribution needed at all in our case?
This is a key issue for corporate users.
