[OSM-legal-talk] Can feature names be determined from copyrighted data?

[Elizabeth Dodd]

On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Pavel Zubkou wrote:
> Hi legal-talk,
>
> I need your advice on the following use case. If I understood things
> right, Landsat's WMS Global Mosaic data can be freely used to create
> and publish data to OSM. So if I trace some lake in the forest and
> create a polygon for it using Landsat's data as backgroud it is legal,
> right? After that I want to name the lake accordingly. Can I look at
> copyrighted map for a name of lake that is placed at about 10km
> northen from city X? Is this information can be used to name that lake
> at OSM? Or shoud I search for some CC licensed source which refer to
> that lake by name?
>
> Regards, Pavel.

Search for alternate sources of information. Read a travel article on the 
area. Look in the directories for businesses on the lake (say a boat hire 
place would say they had boats on Lake XYZ), and when you have determined from 
5 or more pieces of information that the name of the lake is XYZ, you didn't 
copy from a map, and you have made reasonably sure that the name is correct. 
Hopefully one of the sources is CC licensed too.