[OSM-legal-talk] Monopoly City Streets

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Peter Millar<peter.millar at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think that OSM is entitled to ask if the Creative Commons license has been complied with.
>
> The Monopoly City Streets game is produced by Tribal DDB which is part of Hasbro Inc., one of the biggest toy manufacturers in the world. They own, among others, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble and work on toys with Disney. The City Streets game is part of their strategy to bring game profitability to the internet.
>
> Hasbro Inc. does not hesitate to pursue anyone who get too near to their intellectual property. It was Hasbro who went after Scrabulous last year.
>
> It has got to be very unlikely that Hasbro would share any insights into Google's maps' Easter Eggs. Both company's understand intellectual property very well; Hasbro well enough to tell us whether they are complying with the CC license.

It's worthwhile to stop for a moment to consider why Monopoly City
Streets opted for this Frankensteinian merger of Google Maps tiles
with OpenStreetMap vector data (which doesn't always line up).
Probably because:

 * Nobody other than OSM would give them vector data
 * Nobody other than Google provided tile hosting for this sort of
project (and they didn't want to set up their own servers).

I don't know what Google's policy is for a project like this. Are they
getting the tiles for free or are they buying something like Google
Maps API Premier[1] ?

If it's the latter perhaps the startups that are trying to
commercialize OSM [2][3] should contact Monopoly City Streets and
offer them OSM-based tiles at a competitive prize.

That would improve things for Monopoly City Streets by getting them
off shaky legal ground and improving their game by making tiles match
up with the actual data. The OSM project would get more positive
exposure. Annd everyone on this list would have free time to play
armchair lawyer on some other issue.

1. http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps_features.html
2. http://www.geofabrik.de/
3. http://cloudmade.com/