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

Fri Nov 11 16:24:27 UTC 2005

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 12:35:18PM +0000, Roger Longhorn wrote:
> 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)

oh, burst my literalistic bubble, the lot of you. But i have some
questions about both copyright and redistribution. 

BoundaryLine is one case, clearly identified as a product and under
copyright. If Clive's FoI request for the data works for him, and then
i make an identical request and am given *access* to the data... then
i build a web service, which allows a query to make use of that data
set without actually revealing the contents of the data set. Say,
"from a lat/long pair, which ward boundary am i within", with a
throttle to prevent people easily brute-forcing the shapes out.

Would my web service be a 'derived work' and as such illegal without a
license to use the copyrighted work?

TfL's routing data is another case. It's not one body of data in a
publication scheme or on the market. Some of it is probably the IP of
other organisations than TfL (GovData?). Is it possible that some of it
is just data kicking around on internal systems which has never been 
published to third parties or had IP rights in it considered? 

As Roger points out to get access rights even before exploitation
rights, one needs to get a description of what is available, and 
what rights constrict what is available. 

Might there actually be a risk that data held by authorities about
which there is no rights decision would get covered with a blanket
copyright statement in the face of an FoI request? And is there an
absurdity in the fact that, as Rufus points out in theory every UK
citizen could make the same request for e.g. BoundaryLine and be
granted 'access' to it? 

But it does sounds as if the intent of the directive on *re-use* of
public sector information is so thoroughly stymied by database
copyright law, that the ability to build local civic information
applications, really can only be had at a price or at supplication.

abashed,

-jo