[OSM-legal-talk] Starting Repository For Public Domain OSM Data

Nic Roets nroets at gmail.com
Wed Oct 15 18:07:51 BST 2008


On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Joseph Gentle <josephg at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I think the idea that everything only touched by PD contributors is PD
> data is easily good enough. It would be a tough sell to say that
> because your road is next to my road, I have intellectual property
> rights over the road you drew. (Especially since facts can't be
> copyrighted in the first place).
>

Not quite true : It's quite likely that a PD user will split a way created
by a non-PD user, and then change or delete the old way with the history, so
that it's impossible for software to detect the origin of the new way.

Furthermore, OSM contains a little bit of stylistic details that may not be
extracted to a PD database. A user may for example tag the road going
through the village as unclassified vs. residential for the rest of the
village, even though all the roads have the same width and markings.

But if you want to go PD, then do it ! I have a lot of untainted data ready
for upload. It may just turn out to be a nice backup database where vandals
aren't very active.
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