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

[Frederik Ramm]

David,

David Groom wrote:
> 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.

I fixed that page.

If you read the page closely, it already said further down that "It 
seems to be more a case of agreeing an interpretation of their Terms of 
Use.", and the Yahoo! guy quoted did not say anything about an "agreement".

Truth is, Yahoo were approached by us and basically said: "Yes we think 
it's ok if someone traces vector data from our maps, that would not be 
our copyright anymore". Which meant, *specifically*, that OSM could 
trace and release under CC-BY-SA, and since that was all that was of 
interest to us at the time, we put that wording on the wiki page.

If there ever was an "agreement" it was not about who can use the data 
under what license, but instead - and that took us a while to sort out - 
how exactly we were allowed to display Yahoo data in our editors.

Mikel Maron did the talks with Yahoo at the time.

Bye
Frederik