09 Jun 2015
Dr. Jankowska is an assistant professor in the faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Silesia in Katowice in Poland, as well as an experienced attorney specializing in intellectual property, new technologies and geoinformation law. She will visit the University of Nebraska College of Law June 10 through July 11, 2015 as a Visiting Researcher in order to further research legal issues concerning spatial data.
Dr. Jankowska holds an extensive publication record in the fields of civil law, copyright law, energy law, geoinformation law, commercial law and public procurement law. Recently she edited and co-authored the book Geoinformaton. Law and Practice (IusPublicum, Warsaw 2014) together with many prominent researchers and experts in the field. She defended her PhD dissertation in Intellectual Property Law, entitled Author and the Right of Attribution, in 2010 at the University of Silesia in Katowice, after which it was published as a book under the same title by Wolters Kluwer Poland in 2011 (555 p.). She has been guest lecturer at several institutions, namely the University of Hertfordshire (June 2013), Nottingham Law School at Nottingham Trent University (February 2014) and University of Nantes (March 2015) and has carried out research at Max Planck Institute in Munich, ALS Library in London and the library of WIPO in Geneva.
Currently, Dr. Jankowska is preparing her book on copyright issues concerning maps. Significant changes in the nature of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) have created new legal uncertainties that have not yet received sufficient attention from the legal profession in Europe. The practice of using SDI has nevertheless shown that there are many legal issues worth noting, especially concerning intellectual property rights. On that subject, what we have to confront in the doctrine of copyright law is the balance between the competing principles of accessibility of public information against the principles of copyright protection. At the same time, the technological challenge stimulates doubts about the copyright protection even more, as it is not certain whether SDIs are copyrightable at all. As there are many standpoints in that matter, it has to be answered whether U.S. and European legal regulations, as well as the technical framework of creating the digital data and databases (e.g. the ISO standards), can strip away the creative element from the work. It should also be noted that the current legal standpoint on maps is a vague one that leaves many unanswered questions. Should we, for example, assume that an idea may only be copyrightable if it is individualized, creative and has been articulated in some form? Do we need to re-imagine the relationship between factual content (e.g. geographical information) and a creative form of expression (e.g. a cartographic map)? Additional challenges emerge when we consider the relationship of the above to space law.
Dr. Jankowska would like to express her gratitude to Dr. Susan Poser, the Dean of University of Nebraska College of Law, and Professor Frans von der Dunk, Harvey & Susan Perlman Alumni Othmer Professor of Space Law, for this opportunity to research legal spatial data issues at the Nebraska Law.