[cc-community] Is the CC-BY-2.5-AU license applicable to geodata?
Anne Fitzgerald
am.fitzgerald at qut.edu.au
Mon Oct 4 18:00:04 EDT 2010
Hi
It is best to ignore the earlier discussion re the legal position of OpenStreetMap as that was complicated by the database rights in the UK and some other European countries. Only the UK and European countries have database rights, which causes complications for European contributors to common projects.
To simplify the laws of jurisdiction greatly, it is unlikely that a person contributing to any such project outside the European Union would have database rights. The only rights they have is copyright (unless they have also entered into a separate contract that extends their rights and/or obligations).
Creative Commons was developed to apply to copyright. It is an up-front licence of copyright.
In Australia (which recognises moral rights for authors) and probably in most other countries it is best to use CC-BY. CC0 reverts to CC-BY in Australia, and can cause confusion, so it is best to use CC-BY.
If there are numerous contributors of CC-licensed material to a common work, a good example of how to manage attribution of a multitude of contributors is the way it is done on Wikipedia, which is probably the largest CC-licensed work in existence at the present time. Set up a page so it is possible to see who has made contributions and when (whether under the contributors' real names or their online tags/usernames).
Anne
Professor Anne Fitzgerald
QUT Law Faculty
________________________________________
From: cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Niklas Cholmkvist [towardsoss at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 5 October 2010 7:39 AM
To: creative commons community mailing list
Subject: [cc-community] Is the CC-BY-2.5-AU license applicable to geodata?
Hi,
I've recently noted a website called commonmap.info which aims to
distribute geographical data under the license 'Attribution 2.5
Australia' . Does it legally give rights to the author/authors of the
data to have attribution from those who get the data under that license?
When I visited the legal-talk mailing lists of OpenStreetMap in the past
2-3 years I read that Creative Commons didn't agree that CC-BY-SA-2.0
was a valid license for geographical data. Is this the same case with
the license 'Attribution 2.5 Australia'?
If I remember correctly it was suggested that 'public domain' be used
for the geographical data. The only application of 'public domain' that
I know of is the 'CC0 1.0 Universal' waiver. Hypothetically, could that
waiver be used for geographical data?
Regards,
Niklas
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