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

[Landon Blake]

Thanks Alex.

I'm interested specifically in US law for this talk. I'm familiar with
copyright law and how it applies to geospatial data. However, most of
what I know about licensing comes from software and the local agency
licenses for geospatial data that I deal with.

I'll do some more poking around.

Landon

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Alex Mandel
<tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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