[OSM-legal-talk] Mass import of TeleAtlas data

[Albertas Agejevas]

Dear all,

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 03:18:14PM +0300, Albertas Agejevas wrote:
> I hope this is the right place for these matters.
> 
> I have found evidence that user Pranas seems to have uploaded lots of
> Google Maps/TeleAtlas data into OSM.

So, almost 6 months have passed since my alert about the obvious
data transfer from TeleAtlas to OSM.  Since then we have exchanged a
dozen of emails with Andy Robinson.  However, nothing appears to have
been done in terms of removing even the most obviously copied data out
of the database.  As far as I know, the original offender has
responded to Andy's requests, but failed to provide GPS tracks for
most areas he has mapped.  Andy informed me that after the Pranas
account has been suspended, around 50 accounts were registed in a
short amount of time.  Copies of TeleAtlas data continued to appear in
OSM, with 2 - 3 users working on each town, more in larger towns.  Now
most Lithuanian towns and cities have been copied.

When I contacted him, the user who started the upload did not claim he
has a permission to upload the data, later to Andy he ostencibly
claimed that he has the tracks he made with the friend.  None of the
later sock puppet accounts ever responded to my messages.

In my original email, I provided a planned network of streets that is
not yet there on the ground, although has made it to the TeleAtlas
data already, and got copied into OSM:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&ie=UTF8&ll=56.00042,21.08855&spn=0.017158,0.040641&t=h&z=15
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=56.00042&lon=21.08855&zoom=15&layers=B00FTF

I have verified with people who go there often that these streets are
not there yet.  The area looks the same as captured on the Google
satellite imagery.  There are some more houses along the existing
streets, but the new streets have not yet been built.

There's one more very obviously copied place in Kanunas:

http://www.maps.lt/map/query.aspx?action=showobject&objID=simple%24x5b213221f85f6bfa
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=54.923282,23.942063&spn=0.004452,0.010418&t=h&z=17
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=54.923&lon=23.9422&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF

The satellite photos and GIS-Centras (state mapping company) data
demonstrate that a part of the park has been converted to residential
housing at least several years ago, However user gediminast1 mapped
paths that match those in Google Maps data and going right through
houses built in the area!

Here are some of the user names that have been used to upload the
suspect data:

  kazlauskas gediminast1 janina1 musi_ke fonasgraoz darinabod lazzymoon
  btnb4683 povilas lordesvona vejuvejas gorygary johtmoris

When I last checked, none of these had anything on their user page,
and have uploaded no traces.  Grep for them in the Lithuania excerpt
(http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/lithuania.osm.bz2): each of
them has been used just for two-three times to upload several tens or
hundereds of ways.

I am bringing this up in the public forum again as our correspondence
with the OSMF secretary Andy Robinson appears to have no results.  On
7 October 2008 Andy informed me that OSMF was going to ask these
50-ish suspect users to provide proof that they are legitimate
contributors and delete their data if no satisfactory response had
been received in 7 days.  However, as you can see from my examples
above, 4 months past the copied data is still in the database.

I'm afraid that this can damage the whole project, or at the very
least the Lithuanian dataset I'm working on.  If you are not, read
this:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony#Song_credits
  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs#OS_vs_AA

Best regards,
Albertas