[OSM-legal-talk] Licensing advice for a potential data source?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 10:18 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hi, folks! I'm a new OSM contributor in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'm doing
> some manual, on-the-ground, local knowledge mapping, but I'm also
> looking for importable sources of important data types we're currently
> missing locally.
> 
> There is a guy running a project at http://wherepost.ca/ to produce a
> crowdsourced database of post box locations in Canada. There's a
> feedback page at http://wherepost.ca/about/ where I've been interacting
> with him. I believe his intent is for this information to be free, but I
> don't think he has the necessary framework in place for this:
> 
> Me: "Hi, Steve. I'm wondering if the dataset for this site is available
> in a processable form anywhere, and what the license on the data is. I'd
> love to look at the possibility of adding the information to
> OpenStreetMap. Thanks!"
> 
> Him: "hah! I've never thought of a license for this. My take has been
> this is/should be entirely public data - Canada post is a crown
> corporation, and so anyone should be able to use this for any
> non-commercial purpose."
> 
> I'm not a lawyer (that's why I'm mailing this list :>) but I believe his
> assumption that the data is already free by nature of its...nature is
> incorrect, as I explained in a follow-up comment.
> 
> Would anyone be able/willing to help the admin make whatever changes are
> necessary to his project to make it properly free and hence reusable by
> OSM and, of course, other projects? I think he'd be happy to have the
> help.

I should note that since sending this mail, it's come to my attention
that Canada Post is extremely sue-happy, and has since 2012 been
pursuing an *extremely* controversial legal action against a
crowdsourced database of postcodes:

http://geocoder.ca/?sued=1

so I guess we'd want to be extremely defensive and conservative (even
more so than OSM apparently usually is) in importing to OSM anything at
all related to Canada Post. (nominatim lets you query geocoder.ca data
by default, but of course that could easily be lifted out if necessary).
There are differences to the post box location topic - Canada Post does
not sell information on post box locations, and I don't see how they
really could monetize that information, so they may care less about it -
but it's hard to predict the actions of an organization willing to bring
such an absurd and vindictive case, I guess. They could try their
trademark wheeze with the word 'postbox', or something.

Thanks!
-- 
adamw