3 ms·

Does Apple legally have to give credit? I thought facts couldn't be copyrighted (from the MLB vs fantasy baseball case - http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/11/cas

Does Apple legally have to give credit? I thought facts couldn't be copyrighted (from the MLB vs fantasy baseball case - http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/11/case-cbc-v-major-league-baseball.html http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/11/case-cbc-v-major-league-...) and wouldn't map data qualify as facts?

georgemcbay 15y ago
IANAL but from what I understand "facts" can't be copyrighted, but a collection of facts can be. eg. A business' address/phone number can't be copyrighted on its own, but a specific collection of them into a Yellow Pages can be.
- ecopoesis 15y ago
  I wonder if that means Apple could take the individual facts from OSM, add a few in from their other sources, reorder the facts (or just build their own tiles from them since that's all they're presenting) and be okay legally?
  - Steko 15y ago
    Don't overthink it, they just forgot the attribution line. It doesn't cost them anything to add it, they just didn't put it in. It's not a big deal despite the 500 articles that have been written about it.
- rcfox 15y ago
  This isn't true in Canada. http://www.lmlaw.ca/copyright_raw_data.pdf http://www.lmlaw.ca/copyright_raw_data.pdf "...the selection or arrangement of data only results in a protected compilation if the end result qualifies as an original intellectual creation." (This actually saved me in university when the school wanted to charge me with copyright violation after I scraped their job database to make it easier to work with.)
  - veyron 15y ago
    storytime! I want to hear more
    - rcfox 15y ago
      Well, the university uses a crappy PeopleSoft webapp thing for searching for co-op jobs. It's slow, ugly, and it goes offline every night at midnight. It's terrible. I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jobs. However, a listing of {employer,job title,location} seemed harmless enough. I wrote it such that it ran once and spat out a static HTML file so that it wouldn't be constantly accessing the original server. Then I hosted it on my university account and told people about it via Twitter. I had no intention of hiding it; I wanted it to help people! Also, I posted the scraping script (which required a university account to login before it could run) on GitHub for others to use or improve. Y'know. A few days later, my account had been disabled! When I went to see the people in charge, they told me that I was violating their copyright and since I has posted my code to scrape, they considered me to be a malicious hacker. They also said that I could have single-handedly taken down the co-op program at the university. For my formal response, I learned some obscure details about Canadian copyright law (like what I posted in the grandparent), and took the opportunity to educate the administrators on hacker culture (with the help of Eric Raymond). I also made sure to explain the implications of my script (runs only once, requires a login, links to the actual copyrighted works). Oh, and I used some of my connections with IT security and professors as character reference. In the end, they decided to punish me for reproducing their data (which the login screen technically prohibits, but it's unrealistic- having the page in memory is a reproduction!) by making me take a business ethics course, which was actually a fun and interesting course. No criminal charges, no expulsion/suspension. I figured it wasn't too bad, though I would have appreciated an apology for essentially calling me a terrorist. ;)
      - reledi 15y ago
        What would have happened if you declined to take the course? Do you think you "learned your lesson", or would you do something like this again if you had the chance?
jaakl 15y ago
Map qualifies as "set of facts" just as much as a photograph of something is representation of a fact. So no, maps are not facts. It is quite subjective model of the world. I would say that OSM is huge collaborative piece of art, and I'm proud to be one of the artists there.

georgemcbay 15y ago

IANAL but from what I understand "facts" can't be copyrighted, but a collection of facts can be. eg. A business' address/phone number can't be copyrighted on its own, but a specific collection of them into a Yellow Pages can be.

ecopoesis 15y ago
I wonder if that means Apple could take the individual facts from OSM, add a few in from their other sources, reorder the facts (or just build their own tiles from them since that's all they're presenting) and be okay legally?
- Steko 15y ago
  Don't overthink it, they just forgot the attribution line. It doesn't cost them anything to add it, they just didn't put it in. It's not a big deal despite the 500 articles that have been written about it.
rcfox 15y ago
This isn't true in Canada. http://www.lmlaw.ca/copyright_raw_data.pdf http://www.lmlaw.ca/copyright_raw_data.pdf "...the selection or arrangement of data only results in a protected compilation if the end result qualifies as an original intellectual creation." (This actually saved me in university when the school wanted to charge me with copyright violation after I scraped their job database to make it easier to work with.)
- veyron 15y ago
  storytime! I want to hear more
  - rcfox 15y ago
    Well, the university uses a crappy PeopleSoft webapp thing for searching for co-op jobs. It's slow, ugly, and it goes offline every night at midnight. It's terrible. I got fed up with trying to use it, so I looked at the HTML and decided that it was easy enough to parse. I made the deliberate decision to link to the original job descriptions so that you'd still have to log in to find any real information about the jobs. However, a listing of {employer,job title,location} seemed harmless enough. I wrote it such that it ran once and spat out a static HTML file so that it wouldn't be constantly accessing the original server. Then I hosted it on my university account and told people about it via Twitter. I had no intention of hiding it; I wanted it to help people! Also, I posted the scraping script (which required a university account to login before it could run) on GitHub for others to use or improve. Y'know. A few days later, my account had been disabled! When I went to see the people in charge, they told me that I was violating their copyright and since I has posted my code to scrape, they considered me to be a malicious hacker. They also said that I could have single-handedly taken down the co-op program at the university. For my formal response, I learned some obscure details about Canadian copyright law (like what I posted in the grandparent), and took the opportunity to educate the administrators on hacker culture (with the help of Eric Raymond). I also made sure to explain the implications of my script (runs only once, requires a login, links to the actual copyrighted works). Oh, and I used some of my connections with IT security and professors as character reference. In the end, they decided to punish me for reproducing their data (which the login screen technically prohibits, but it's unrealistic- having the page in memory is a reproduction!) by making me take a business ethics course, which was actually a fun and interesting course. No criminal charges, no expulsion/suspension. I figured it wasn't too bad, though I would have appreciated an apology for essentially calling me a terrorist. ;)
    - reledi 15y ago
      What would have happened if you declined to take the course? Do you think you "learned your lesson", or would you do something like this again if you had the chance?

jaakl 15y ago

Map qualifies as "set of facts" just as much as a photograph of something is representation of a fact. So no, maps are not facts. It is quite subjective model of the world. I would say that OSM is huge collaborative piece of art, and I'm proud to be one of the artists there.