[cc-community] Infringing IPR with collective works
Paul Dixon
paul at elphin.com
Tue Oct 24 08:29:19 EDT 2006
I help to run Geograph British Isles (http://www.geograph.org.uk), a
free and open resource of geographical photographs of the UK and
Ireland. We currently have over 250,000 cc-by-sa works comprising a
photograph and associated metadata.
Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency for Great Britain, is
making their maps available to us to use on the site.
Displaying an OS map next to a CC licenced work should not be problem,
as long as we make it clear which parts of the page are CC licenced and
which parts are Crown Copyright.
The thornier part is that we'd like to display a map during the photo
submission process, and allow users to geolocate their photographs by
clicking on an OS map. The OS have told us they are happy for us to
allow users to create a CC licenced work which contains geolocation data
derived in this way.
What they would not be happy with is someone taking the entire
collective works and deriving a map which infringes OS intellectual
property. They would take legal action against anyone who attempted to
recreate an OS map from such material.
I'd appreciate opinions on whether
a) this is fine, and not incompatible with the CC licence
b) this is incompatible, and we need to use another licence or avoid
using current maps to geolocate the works
c) this is incompatible, but as only someone actively seeking to
infringe OS IPR is at risk, we can continue (the full steam ahead and
f*** the icebergs option)
Paul Dixon
Geograph Project Ltd
http://blog.dixo.net
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