Phil Cook wrote on Wed, 14 Jul 2004 22:09:46 +0100....
Quoted message said:If the grid references are taken from the map then they are derived
from a copyrighted work and contain an element of OS copyright.
Copyright is the right to copy an artistic work (or a literary or
musical or dramatic work or a few other types of work which aren't
relevant here). The law can be pretty flexible about what qualifies
as an "artistic" work, e.g. it doesn't necessarily have to have any
artistic merit. However, mere information in itself doesn't qualify
for copyright, unless it makes up one of those types of work.
Furthermore, for something to infringe copyright, it not only has to
be derived from the original work. It also has to be a **copy** of it
(or of a substantial part of it) - in the sense that it is a
representation that reproduces the original artistic work in some way.
Again, mere information doesn't infringe, unless that information
forms a representation that reproduces a copy of the original in some
way.
Thus, it's often said that there's no copyright in ideas, only in the
way you express your ideas.
There might be copyright in the OS grid, as an "artistic" work. But
there's no copyright in (say) an underlying piece of information, such
as the knowledge of whereabouts on the earth's surface the datum of
the grid is. That information is just information, not an artistic
or other copyrightable work.
(By way of an analogy, consider Albert Einstein's scientific paper
where he first expounded the theory of relativity. That was a
literary work, and had copyright. If you made a copy of the paper
without permission, you would have infringed. But there was never any
copyright in the underlying information and knowledge. Everyone has
always been free to write and publish, for example, the equation
E=mc^2.)
So, as I say, the OS might perhaps be able to claim that the grid as
shown on a map is an artistic work. Likewise, they might claim
copyright in a digital representation of the grid. (Yes, this digital
data is information, but it's more than just mere information
because it also forms a representation of the artistic work.)
If you then put that grid onto a map of your own you might be
infringing. That's because you are making a copy of the grid.
Ditto if the OS put a new grid onto an old map, which would otherwise
be out-of-copyright, or if they alter the old map to fit it to a
different grid projection. If you make a photocopy or a scan of the
map, you are reproducing the new grid (or the new projection of the
map), and could be infringing copyright.
If you (say) store information digitally that recreates a substantial
part of the grid when read by a computer, that too might infringe the
copyright.
However, AJH's collection of grid references did none of these things.
It might be *derived* from the grid, but it's not a *copy* of the
grid. No matter what you do with those references, you can't
transform them into anything which reproduces the grid itself. So
they don't infringe any copyright in the grid.
The only thing that this collection of grid references records is a
particular route. You could plot that route onto a map if you wanted,
and that wouldn't infringe any OS copyright (assuming the map was
legit before you started, of course). The OS are not the authors of
that route, so they don't have any copyright in it. It was
(presumably) AJH who devised the route, so it would be him that was
the author. (Assuming that a court would be prepared to hold that it
was sufficiently substantial to qualify for any copyright in the first
place).
The position might be different if you took a series of grid
references off a map in order to record a detailed track of a
particular path or road *as shown on the map*. A court might say that
that path or road constituted a "substantial" part of the map, and
that the collection of grid references was sufficiently detailed to
reproduce it.
But AJH's collection of grid references doesn't reproduce any
particular path or road on the map - I checked. The closest it comes
is to record the positions of some of the path and road junctions and
significant features (e.g. the car parks). If you plotted the points
on a blank sheet of paper, they wouldn't reproduce the shape of any
path or road that you can see on the map. So they are not a copy of
any feature on the map.
Maybe you are thinking that merely recording the positions of those
junctions and features would infringe copyright in some way. It's
easy to see that this is not so. If it were, we would all be guilty
of copyright infringment, every time we gave a grid reference in this
newsgroup.
You might say that normally we only post one or two references, and
that AJH has posted a list with many more than one or two. True. But
then you are talking about the possibility of copyright in the
*collection* of points, rather than in the *individual* points. As
already discussed, the OS weren't the authors of that collection.
--
Tim Jackson
[email hidden]
(Change '.invalid' to '.co.uk' to reply direct)
Absurd patents: visit http://www.patent.freeserve.co.uk
