[Publicwhip-playing] Re: [geo-discuss] Re: [Openstreetmap] Coders needed for similar project & UK FOI act request update.

[Roger Longhorn]

James is quite correct. FoI is about access, NOT exploitation. Copyright 
is copyright, regardless of how you gain access to the material. In 
countries like the USA where much (not all) federal data and information 
is automatically, legally put into the public domain (a legal dimension 
of data, nothing to do with whether or not it is made publicly 
available), then anyone can do anything that they want to/with it. 
Assuming that you can find it - hence the FoI Act in the USA, which 
prevents the US government from hiding such public domain info from view 
- you cannot exploit what you cannot see/find!

In most of Europe - not just the UK - and in Cnada, Australia and many 
other countries in the world, government data is copyrighted by the 
government or the department or agency who created it. Don't forget, 
unless something is *put *in the public domain explicitly either by law 
(as in USA for federal data - only federal, not state or local gov data) 
or by declaration (you can surrender your copyright officially, 
declaring that something for which you hold copyeright is now in the 
public domain), then cpyright in the material still exists. And in 
databases, copyright now exists due implementation of the EU's Database 
Protection Directive across all EU Member States (25).

Simply gaining access to information or a dataset by way of your 
country's FoI Act does NOT confer any rights to re-use of that data. 
Those of you who have been assuming that FoI in the UK will answer your 
data problems had better take some professional legal acvice very soon, 
at least before you decide to launch any new product or service, even 
for free, without the express permission of the data/information owner 
(copyrght holder). The fines for copyright infringement are quite 
horrendous. And similar fines apply for 'vicarious copyright 
infringement' which covers cases where you publish or exploit someone 
else's material, thinking that it was copyright-free, when in fact it 
was not - even if you did not realise this!

Regards

Roger Longhorn
ral at alum.mit.edu
(recent gradutate of the WIPO Academy course in Copyright and Related 
Rights, July, 2005).

James Cronin wrote:

>Hi Jo,
>
>  
>
>>On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 12:59:23PM -0800, Jo Walsh wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>hello clive, list,
>>>On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 05:05:26PM +0000, Clive Galway wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>On a side note, as a result of this project, I am currently trying to push through a Freedom of Information Act request on the British Government to get them to release UK political boundary data (eg counties etc) into the public domain on the grounds that political boundaries of our country are the property of the populace and not Ordnance Survey as they are saying.
>>>>The original request was denied, it is currently on appeal and I am in talks with the ombudsman's office ( The governing body one appeals to if they feel the request / appeal has been unlawfully denied ) who seem to be quite outraged that this information is not free and they think I am in with a half-decent chance.
>>>>        
>>>>
>
>I'm sorry, this is probably something I don't fully understand, but
>I don't see why information being released to you under FOI necessarily
>places it free of copyright and hence into the public domain?
>
>I'm not a lawyer but I've had a go at reading around this and can't
>see that you'd be granted any additional rights to use data released
>in this way over and above any that you had already just because it was
>disclosed to you under FOI?
>
>Surely it's the rights that you want (or rather the right to further
>distribute without inhibition) not the actual data itself. So I can't
>see why this FOI request is relevant to what you want to achieve.
>
>The boundary data isn't secret. FOI was meant to prevent stuff from
>unnecessarily being secret rather than forcing everything to be free?
>
>Please someone explain how I've got this wrong.
>
>J.
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