Open Geodata in Europe - Inspire directive

[David Gibson]

In article "Open Geodata in Europe - Inspire directive" in <!cave-
surveying>, on Mon, 15 May 2006
Eric Madelaine <Eric.Madelaine at sophia.inria.fr> wrote

>David Gibson wrote:
>
>>I think you might be misunderstanding the use of the term "literary
>>work" in the (English) copyright act. If I collect some facts and write
>>them down, that is a literary work within the meaning of the act and I
>>have full copyright protection under English law. No conceivable
>>argument about *that*.
>>  
>>
>I would be interested with more details about this argument...
>We currently have some arguments with the french ministry of ecology, 
>that wants the caving federation (FFS) to give them (for free) our lists 
>of cave entrances, and argue that there cannot be any intellectual 
>property on the list of coordinates, because they are just "facts"...

I think you could successfully argue that your list required "research"
to create it, and that some considerable time and intellectual effort
had been expended in collecting the data, checking it and so on. That
amounts to an IPR, if you want my opinion. :-)

But this is slightly beside the point. Remember: copyright does not
protect you against someone stealing your IPR. It is a protection
against *copying*. It is not directly concerned with any intellectual
property invested in any "facts" you have collected. [*]

French law might be different but, in England if you wrote down your
facts, or put them on a web site, or set them to music :-) the resulting
work would automatically be copyright (provided you had not breached
someone else's copyright in creating the work) regardless of the worth
of the facts themselves. You have created a "literary work" simply by
using your skill to arrange the facts on paper (at least in English law)
and this is protected by copyright.

Obviously, if you took legal action against anyone for breach of
copyright, the court would treat the copying of your personal Christmas
card list slightly less seriously than the copying of your database of
cave entrances.


[*] On the subject of copyright and IPR, here's an example of the
difference.  I have designed a flashgun slave unit for cave photography
and I have published the circuit.  If you were to photocopy my article
you would be in breach of my copyright (apart from certain statutory
exceptions).  But if you were to build a slave unit using my circuit,
you would *not* be breaching my copyright: you have not "copied" my
publication, you have used my intellectual property, and that's not the
same thing!   If I wanted to stop you building my slave units (e.g.
suppose you were selling them for profit) I would have to invoke either
a patent protection or something called "Design Right" in English law.
(My slave units are protected by Design Right by the way :-)


To steer this back to cave surveying,... copyright and IPR law varies
from country to country, so what Im saying might not apply in France,
but it seems to me that there is clearly some IPR associated with your
database of cave entrances. You can protect any document *containing*
the data against *copying* by invoking copyright. But you might find
this difficult to defend in court. The Ministry of Ecology simply needs
to say "we didnt use your data, we collected our own data instead".

The traditional way to thwart this defence is to deliberately introduce
mistakes into your data - mis-spell a cave name, or change the co-
ordinates slightly, or invent a non-existent cave. If you see a document
containing this incorrect data, you *know* it must have been created by
copying your data.

Apparently, this ruse is frequently used by publishers of dictionaries.
I have come across an example in a dictionary of music composers where
the publishers invented a composer who did not exist.

-- 
David Gibson