[OSM-legal-talk] Is tracing from Yahoo allowed under the CT's

[Anthony]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:01 PM, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony" <osm at inbox.org>
>> To: "Licensing and other legal discussions."
>> <legal-talk at openstreetmap.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:12 PM
>> Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Is tracing from Yahoo allowed under the CT's
>>
>> A good start would be an explanation of why a user *wouldn't* be
>> allowed to trace data from Yahoo.  Why do they need permission in the
>> first place?
>>
>
> Well for a start the CT's require that any content you add does not "best of
> Your knowledge, infringe any third party's rights".  So unless you attempt
> to see if you can use a source I cannot see how you possibly could argue
> that use of Yahoo was in accordance with the CT's.

I don't know of any rights which Yahoo has which would be infringed
upon.  I guess you do?

Any copyright in the aerials (which per the explanation at
http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=100 appears to be irrelevant) would
likely be held by someone other than Yahoo.

> Secondly from the second line of
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Yahoo#Legalities  you will see the phrase
> "Yahoo! have agreed to let OSM use their aerial imagery" [ under the old
> licence terms], and large parts of the remainder of that page go on to
> mention the agreement with Yahoo etc.  Do you seriously think that people at
> Yahoo and people at OSM would have spent all that time coming to an
> agreement to use Yahoo under the old licence terms if such permission was in
> fact not needed.

My understanding is that there actually is no "agreement".  Rather,
someone from Yahoo (who can't even bind the company to anything),
looked at the TOS and said that what OSM users were doing wasn't in
violation of Yahoo's terms of service (looking at that wiki page,
apparently what they said was that OSM tracing "appears to be well
within the terms of use").

I came to this understanding when I asked (I believe on this mailing
list) to see the exact wording of the agreement with Yahoo.

> Thirdly there is the post by someone called SteveC at
> http://old.opengeodata.org/2006/12/04/yahoo-aerial-imagery-in-osm/index.html
> .  SteveC writes "Yahoo! have agreed to let OSM use their aerial imagery."
> and he end his post "Thanks again Yahoo".  So presumably Stevec though that
> Yahoo needed to give us permissiontouse it; we could not just go ahead and
> use it without their permission.

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.  Maybe he was right, maybe he was
wrong.  Maybe he's changed his mind, maybe he hasn't.

> Hopefully the above points have explained why you cant simply assume you can
> trace from Yahoo.

Well, I don't know that I can "simply assume I can trace from Yahoo".
But I also can't simply assume that I can't.  I haven't seen much of
an argument one way or the other, though
(http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=100) is a pretty good argument that
copyright law wouldn't be a problem.