[Aust-NZ] OSM Licensing - [was Fwd: RE: Aust-NZ Digest, Vol 36, Issue 8] [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Robert Coup]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 3:58 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 8 September 2010 10:24, Robert Coup <robert.coup at koordinates.com>
> wrote:
> > I'm not disagreeing, and in Australia & NZ datasets have traditionally
> been
> > seen as being covered by copyright. However, the Australian Federal Court
> > recently ruled that the content of the Yellow & White pages didn't have
> > copyright:
> >
> http://www.copyright.org.au/news/news_items/cases-news/2010-cases/federal-court-finds-white-and-yellow-pages-not-subject-to-copyright/
>
> You are extrapolating from a basic dataset which was deemed to have no
> creative content, to include maps because they may be stored in a
> similar form.
>

I'm not extrapolating, I'm saying that even in a jurisdiction that *has*
traditionally enforced copyright applicability over databases (Australia)
there are potentially issues too (hence the "all is not clear..." bit that
you snipped. And I'd certainly expect Yellow Pages to appeal that decision!

I've specifically been talking about data here, the raw coordinate pairs,
their relations, and the tags associated with them. Maps are clearly a
creative work, clearly covered by copyright, and as you previously said have
been for a *long* time.

In the "old" days the product was always a map. In 2010, I (and probably
many others) couldn't care less about the maps, I'm much more interested in
the underlying data so I can make my own map and do my own analysis. And
that's what ODbL is trying to address for OSM - the product is the data.

CC licenses cover "maps". They don't cover the "data" in a lot of the world.

Rob :)
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