21–30 of 71 posts
> The move may still not happen if the foundation can’t find a suitable country to relocate to. Ireland is out, because of a requirement for directors to be residents; France too, because of the difficulty in guaranteeing English-language services. So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
another fun fact: only the UK, EU and Russia have "database rights". No other country has anything similar. And I'm guessing a good reason why no one else has this has to do with free use and research. Basically, in the EU, UK and Russia I can't even reconstruct your database piece by piece.
> Basically, in the EU, UK and Russia I can't even reconstruct your database piece by piece. You are entitled to create a similar database based on your own efforts or research. So, you could walk the streets of London with an iPad to make your own KmlxStreetMap. You just can't directly copy or transfer rows from someone else's. This seems like a good page: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/database-rights…
They might be useful for something like stopping someone who is in a jurisdiction where they apply from scraping your site to download a database you spent significant money collecting. But that doesn't help you if whoever is scraping your site is based somewhere else, which includes most of the world.
I wonder whether database rights would actually hold up for something like OpenStreetMap anyway. Is OSM generating new data in a creative process or investing significant effort in collecting data that existing sources? If it's the former then copyright probably does apply but database rights probably don't according to CJEU case law. If it's the latter then it's probably the other way around.
Whichever is the case, relocating your whole legal entity to the EU because of an issue like this might be a rather extreme reaction, and from the report it appears the decision here was made on the basis of many small factors and not just the issue of database rights.
It's not really clear to me what the problem is. Doesn't the Open Database License applies everywhere, brexit or not? I never thought that where an "open source" project is physically located as any impact on the license it uses.
I don't understand the problem either. If they're worried someone in the EU is going to clone their database, moving there just means someone in the UK can now do it. And Americans have apparently been free to do it from the start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that the Foundation wouldn’t be able to find English language services in France is a bit of a stretch. I’ve been working in tech here in France for a while now and whether in startups, tech companies, or independently, I’ve never had any trouble conducting business almost entirely in English if I (as the customer) preferred to.
I had a small tech business in Southern France and without the help of a native french speaker it would have been impossible to navigate the Kafkaesque french bureaucracy.
I think that's key.
One really needs an imperative reason to move a business from the UK to France considering how much more business-friendly and, well, sensible, the UK is.
It's not really clear to me what the problem is. Doesn't the Open Database License applies everywhere, brexit or not? I never thought that where an "open source" project is physically located as any impact on the license it uses.
This is partly about "mutual recognition of database rights": "since Brexit, any database made on or after 1 January 2021 in the UK will not be protected in the EU, and vice versa". It's not something most people need to worry about, but I expect OpenStreetMap won't be the only company affected by that.
I'm not sure I follow, surely the OSM database existed before 1/1/21 thus they have no issues or does it apply to db updates?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
English isn't an official language in France. That probably isn't an issue for large companies, but it is a non-starter for small companies.
English is an official language in the EU only in Ireland and Malta though, so if Ireland is out and English is a requirement, it shouldn't be difficult to decide which country to move to.
> The move may still not happen if the foundation can’t find a suitable country to relocate to. Ireland is out, because of a requirement for directors to be residents; France too, because of the difficulty in guaranteeing English-language services. So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?
As someone who's done English support in France, it sounds like preconceived notions that don't match reality. The tech industry is usually literate in English, even if the rest of the country can't give a care.
> The move may still not happen if the foundation can’t find a suitable country to relocate to. Ireland is out, because of a requirement for directors to be residents; France too, because of the difficulty in guaranteeing English-language services. So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a small tech business in Southern France and without the help of a native french speaker it would have been impossible to navigate the Kafkaesque french bureaucracy.
> the Kafkaesque french bureaucracy. I think that's key. One really needs an imperative reason to move a business from the UK to France considering how much more business-friendly and, well, sensible, the UK is.