[epsi-coord] offeneskoelln.de case

Tue May 8 15:42:24 BST 2012

2012/5/8 Daniel Dietrich <daniel.dietrich at okfn.org>:
> Dear Marian,
>
> could you please provide the ePSI team with some details on the legal case on www.offeneskoel.de in english?
>
> The ePSI platform is possibly holding the most up to date database on legal cases about PSI re-use. See
>
> http://epsiplatform.eu/cases
>
> And we are always looking for new interesting cases even when they did not made it to court.
>

Hi!

I'll do my best, although legal is not really my specialty, especially
in foreign languages.

In my project "Offenes Köln" I mass-copy (scrape) documents and data
from the City of Cologne website. The documents I copy are created in
the context of local council and committee work. On my server, I
provide a search function, direct file access via URLs and a
geo-referenced access (map view) of political cases.

There are more than 60,000 files in the repository. One of them,
created by a committee member several years ago, basically resembled
the print view of an online map service. It was used to clarify the
content of a request to the city administration this map was attached
to.

A few weeks after I re-published the documents on my server, the
copyright holder of that map service (Euro-Cities AG, Berlin) became
aware of the copyright-protected material being re-published on my
server. I received a cease-and-desist letter several demands:

- depublish the map
- pay the license fee for using the map: 375 EUR
- pay the lawyer cost: 453 EUR
- sign a commitment, enforcing a penalty if I ever publish material
from Euro-Cities AG again without consent

In the end, Euro-Cities stepped back from their demands and only
wanted me to donate between 100 and 200 EUR to a charity organisation
(a hospice) of my choice.

I of course had to pay my own lawyer.

As a consequence I have now de-published 92 documents do to a risk of
copyright infringement and whenever new documents arrive in the system
I review them to make sure no copryright-protected materials appear.
Of course there is a gray area where I'm not exactly sure and where I
simply hope that the copyright holders don't start prosecuting.
Examples are reports by some third party institutions, plans by
architects and city planners and so on.

Marian