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

[Anthony]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:26 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 August 2010 09:21, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>> I don't know of any rights which Yahoo has which would be infringed
>> upon.  I guess you do?
>
> Like most/all websites they have terms and conditions, so apart from
> copyright there would also be the potential for breach of contract...

A breach of contract for agreeing to the terms of service of another website?

What part of Yahoo's Terms of Service disallow people from agreeing to
OSM's terms of service?

>> 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.
>
> Yahoo license the right to use that imagery, maybe their license
> doesn't cover OSM usage, maybe it does, no one, not even google, seems
> to be in a hurry to figure this out for sure...

Maybe.  But unless their license allows sublicensing (doubtful), the
only people who can give OSM permission to derive from the imagery
would be the copyright holder of the imagery, not Yahoo.

I find it doubful that OSM's use would constitute a derivative work in
the first place.  But if you're worried about that, Yahoo is the wrong
person to talk to about it.

By the way, all the images I've personally seen in the Yahoo API (this
isn't the same as maps.yahoo.com) are most likely USGS.  So there is
no license.  It's public domain.

>> 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").
>
> In other words there is no explicit permission to use their imagery?

Well, it's not *their* imagery.  But no, there's no explicit
permission to use the imagery.  Nor would I say there is there
anything in the OSM contributor terms which says there needs to be.
Especially not the parts I've traced from, which are almost certainly
works of the US government.  Not sure what sources they've used for
the API other than USGS.