{"id":1268,"date":"2010-04-20T12:14:51","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T16:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1268"},"modified":"2010-04-20T09:47:06","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T13:47:06","slug":"a-brace-of-copyright-dilemmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2010\/04\/20\/a-brace-of-copyright-dilemmas\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brace of Copyright Dilemmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are two copyright dilemmas that have come up over the past weeks.\u00a0 I welcome comments and related stories from those of you with experience in these areas.<\/p>\n

\"Streetmap<\/a>

Map of Cambridge, England from OpenStreetMap<\/p><\/div>\n

1. Can the locations of important places visible from a map, and paths traceable on a map, be extracted from a map to which one does not have copyright?\u00a0 If so, what are the risks<\/strong>? Many different perspectives tangle with one another. One comprehensive blog posts<\/a> posits that it may be alright under copyright, but not socially acceptable in open mapping circles (such as OpenStreetMap), nor a protection against being sued by mapping orgs with deep pockets, nor useful if you wish to convince map-data reusers that it is safe to build any sort of application on top of the resulting data without fear of hassle down the line.<\/p>\n

Editors of Wikipedia and of OpenStreetMap don’t agree on how important these topics are, so Wikipedians regularly identify geoinformation from uncited map sources that OSM editors by default decide they cannot use.\u00a0 If the two communities understood one another’s positions and agreed to take different stances, that would be interesting — but at present there are two separate conversations that aren’t considering the same criteria or audiences.<\/p>\n

\"Coca<\/a>

Coca Cola logo, in the public domain<\/p><\/div>\n

2. Is it risky for an organization that wishes to protect its trademarks (from confusing misuse and dilution) to license those marks under a free copyright license?\u00a0 If so, what are the risks<\/strong>?\u00a0 This is a topic that comes up every year or so for Wikimedia, and is recently a hot one, as many Wikimedia projects today refuse to host any images that are not available under a free license, to simplify bulk reuse of dumps.\u00a0 The Swedish Wikipedians recently removed all instances of the Wikimedia logos from their project, since those logos are not freely licensed.\u00a0 No clear answers have emerged about what the risks are; the only definitive statement we have worked out is that ”it does not improve one’s trademark protection to release marks under a free license”.\u00a0 On the other hand, that could be said of most usability improvements we make to the projects, and it would improve overall distributability and reuse of page and media dumps & help avoid these tense annual debates.<\/p>\n

For comparison:<\/p>\n