[OSM-legal-talk] legal FAQ license

[Anthony]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 7:33 PM, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
> Or can the data be insignificant
> enough not to warrant any copyright protection, yet at the same time
> significant enough that it should be left in the database.

Well, yes, it can.  For instance, a bot might make lots and lots of
useful, but obviously non-copyrightable changes (e.g. changing 10,000
instances of amnenity=* to amenity=*).

Yes, it's much easier to just take out all those edits, regardless of
how trivial.  But then what happens when a bot changes nme=Joe's
Seafood to name=Joe's Seafood and then a human changes name=Bob's
Seafood?  The simple algorithm is going to throw out the human edit
along with the bot edit.

>From my preliminary analysis, the simple, moral way of doing things
would result in massive amounts of data loss.