[OSM-legal-talk] Non-existant streets

[John Smith]

--- On Wed, 12/8/09, Emilie Laffray <emilie.laffray at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, I understand your point. However, I am not sure that
> there is any way to detect if a road exists or not unless
> you are going there. You would need a list of existing roads

We are going out there and using GPS' however if we see a road on another map when deciding what to map, any number of mappers that come after you could end up finding out the same information. This is what I'm trying to prevent by putting a note on OSM or something to that effect to say "Hey there is no road here, don't bother coming to map it!"

> but then we are back to the original point that the data
> came from a proprietary solution hence the reason why you
> end up in a bad situation.

Only to plan routes, we don't copy from them. We still record where we travel via GPS, it's simply a way to work out what needs to be mapped. If using another map to work out a route was copyright infringement no map would ever be able to be used.

> Maybe using STRM data (or the new elevation data) might

STRM is only good for 90m horizontal per pixel which is just as bad as landsat.

> about natural features (I have seen a huge amount of
> shapefile if I remember correctly). You may want to look at
> those to infer what roads could be potentially wrong or not.
> But I am not sure that approach is what we want to do with
> OSM.

I don't think you fully understood me, we're not trying to work out from other maps what roads don't exist, we are trying to tell mappers that come after us that a road they see on a map doesn't exist and don't waste your time trying to map non-existing roads.