[OSGeo-Discuss] Talk on Copyright and Licensing for Geospatial Data

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/13/2012 10:06 AM, Landon Blake wrote:
> OSGeo Folks:
> 
> I'm giving a talk to CCVGPG (http://www.ccvgpg.org), our local GIS
> user group this Friday. My talk will be about copyright and licensing
> of geospatial data. I've found a good amount of information on
> copyright and a bit on its application to GIS. However, I haven't
> found much at all in the way of information about the licensing of
> geospatial data. If you have some references I can investigate, I
> would appreciate that.
> 
> Or, if you work for an organization that had to make decisions about
> the licensing of geospatial data, and you'd be willing to discuss
> things you considered as part of that decision process, please let me
> know.
> 
> I'll post a link to a video of the talk if recording and editing goes OK.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Landon


In the US or internationally(There are some other rules in the EU).
Data is not typically copyrightable in the US because it's not usually
considered a creative work. That's probably why you haven't found much
about it.

Example, road atlas sneaks in a fake road stub - a creative addition,
hence copyrightable, along with their cartography (color choices etc,
bound in a particular way). That's why an atlas can have copyright.

As for licensing, I've not seen anything standard, every service seems
to write up their own for what you can and can't do with data they
provide you. I think this all ends up as contracting law. The typical
from using various map APIs seems to be you can use our data as long as
you show our copyright and don't transfer the data outside of our
API/Progams (E.g. no printing). You might want to look at licensing more
generally rather than specific to geospatial.

Now of course those court cases about parcels in California are all
about if the court think parcel data is data or software.

Thanks,
Alex