| |||||||||||||
Copyrightability of mapsCopyrightability of mapsPosted Jan 18, 2011 8:29 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: Copyrightability of maps by giraffedata Parent article: OpenStreetMap's point of no return
That's an interesting argument, but I'd be surprised if you can find any court case stating that you can copy a map without violating copyright. In the USA, the Copyright Act of 1790 specifically included maps and charts (they were not included in the equivalent British statute of the time).
I'd further suggest that putting the map into computer-readable form does not change its copyright status, not even if you start calling it a 'database'.
Of course the underlying facts themselves are not under the control of anybody, but that does not mean you can copy the representation of them. Similarly, anybody can photograph the Statue of Liberty, but it is not allowed to take somebody else's photo and copy it without their permission. You can certainly use it to learn some facts, such as 'the statue has a spiky hat', but it's not safe to make a copy of the representation of those facts without some clean-room process.
(Log in to post comments)
Copyrightability of maps Posted Jan 26, 2011 0:42 UTC (Wed) by jrochkind (guest, #72573) [Link]
You can not copy the map. But you can take all the street names and locations off of it and draw your own map. If you use exactly the same colors and fonts and smoothings, that might be problematic. But you can use the basic information to draw your own map.
Copyrightability of maps Posted Jan 26, 2011 16:02 UTC (Wed) by an+h0ny (guest, #72530) [Link]
"You can not copy the map. But you can take all the street names and locations off of it and draw your own map."
Correct. But if you're going to do that, you might as well go back to the aerial photos and/or GPS traces and/or public domain data which the OSM map was created from.
To successfully extract all the public domain information out of OSM, you'd almost have to do as much work as just starting from scratch.
It's similar to the fact that you could, in theory, extract all the raw facts out of Wikipedia and then use them to recreate your own encyclopedia, which wouldn't be subject to the copyleft requirements.
|
|||||||||||||