[OSM-legal-talk] [OSM-newbies] Copyright for street names

[Stephen Gower]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 09:54:57AM +0000, rob at robmyers.org wrote:
> Quoting Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivansanchez at escomposlinux.org>:
> > El Domingo, 6 de Enero de 2008, Nic Roets escribió:
> >> IANAL, but it does not feel like infringement to me. The phonebook
> >> company is allowing each of those OSM contributors to access their
> >> database.
> >
> > But it's not allowing to extract big chunks of data.
> 
> This would be a very good question to ask a lawyer, as it has come up  
> in various forms before and it will be problematic if we guess wrong.

  It's only problematic if we guess we can use database sources and
  then find we can't.  If we guess we can't use them (the current
  status quo) and subsequently find we can, then there is no problem.

  Sticking with the status quo is the cheap option (no lawyers on
  either side if all our data is collected from the ground).
  
  s