Free Our Data: Copyright and database right

Tuesday, 10 April, 2007

I was intervewied by Michael Cross of the “Free Our Data” campaign at the Guardian last week. He wrote this up as part of an article titled New study casts doubt on Ordnance Survey’s copyright control, that followed up a blog entry summarising Charlotte Waelde’s report.

I was intrigued by the OSs response to the report. I quote from the article (Scott Sinclair): “We haven’t been able to consider the report in detail, but there is absolutely no doubt that intellectual property rights exist in MasterMap - it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise. In all our topographic information, there is copyright as in artistic works. Therefore use of those works without licence is an infringement.”

I find this amazing because the OS were one of several partners involved in the GRADE Project (which you have to remember was looking at the social, technical and legal aspects to a geospatial data repository) and had full access to the report prior to its publication on 13 March 2007 (a month ago!). And the report does not say that IPR ceases to exist. To the contrary, IPR most definitely remains, its just that Charlotte’s argument is that the Database Directive is far more appropriate for a product like Mastermap than copyright. The argument over “artistic works” remains however. Is Mastermap, the database, artistic in any way or simply a collection of facts??

More musings to follow…

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