[Imports] Importing japanese train stations from Wikipedia

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Fri Oct 12 19:42:41 BST 2012


2012/10/12 Fabien SK <fabiensk at gmail.com>:
> I asked on the Wikipedia discussion page of the «Trains in Japan»
> project  [1]. Someone told me that names (that is the only information I
> retrieved in Wikipedia) cannot copyrighted, so I should be able do to
> use them.


but you would also use the coordinates to the names. I guess this
would in the EU fall under the database directive and be protected
similar to copyright. I am also not a lawyer that's why I am not sure
how to handle this. If everything (you, the wikipedia server, the
wikipedia authors(?)) were outside the EU it would be simple. I guess
in the EU the case you link to in [2] would have to be judged
differently.

Another issue which is often mentioned in conjunction with the idea to
import/use  wikipedia geodata is that the georeferencing there is
often done with sources whose usage terms do not allow extraction of
information from the imagery (e.g. Google). Wikipedia seems to
tolerate this (or maybe it is covered by fair use), but OSM is more
cautious and didn't allow in the past to use geo-information from
wikipedia for this reason.

cheers,
Martin



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