[OSM-legal-talk] Addresses from Land Registry Price Paid Data

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

As you may know, the UK's Land Registry makes available historical
"Price Paid" data for residential property sales, licensed under the
Open Government Licence (OGL). Along with the prices paid, this data
also includes full addresses and postcodes for the properties.

OGL-licensed data is regarded as suitable for use in OSM, and judging
by http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/search?q=land+registry#values
and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors#Land_Registry_-_Price_paid_data
it would appear that people have been making use of the Land Registry
address data in order to help improve OSM's address coverage.

However, I've recently come across this blog post:
http://mapgubbins.tumblr.com/post/103854046790/how-far-can-we-trust-open-data
which points out a potential problem with this data, in its section on
"Third Party Intellectual Property Rights".

Briefly, the OGL has an exclusion for "third party rights the
Information Provider is not authorised to license", and it appears
that such rights may well exist in the addresses in the "Price Paid"
data. If this is the case, then the addresses aren't covered by the
OGL licence, and so we're probably unable to use them in OSM.

>From https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFQ1I_YfTGxcGiwydVxoMdsJAhDmZaXW30NoDeun4k0/edit
Open Addresses appear to have rejected the Land Registry data as a
source for this reason.

There is one ray of hope from the blog post above though, and that is
that s47 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act provides a limited
exemption for some information on public statutory registers. As far
as I can see, under s47(3) the purpose of the copying is limited to
"dissemination" (is all re-use a form of "dissemination"?), and you
need authorisation from the organisation originally publishing the
register (and I'm not sure their current OGL Licence would cover
this), and presumably the exemption only applies in the UK. So I'm not
sure whether this would work for us with ODbL.

I think LWG will need to look in to this in more detail, and let us
know whether or not it is ok to continue using the Land Registry's
"Price Paid" data as a source of addresses in OSM. If not, then do
existing uses also need to be removed from OSM?

This also raises the question of whether there are any other
OGL-licensed datasets out there that have been used in OSM, but which
contain undocumented third-party IP rights that we don't have
permission to use.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker