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

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 21 January 2014 18:18, Adam Williamson <adamw at happyassassin.net> 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:

IANAL, but I think there are three considerations here:

1/ That those contributing give away / license their own rights in the
data they submit

2/ That those contributing don't use sources that are
copyright-encumbered in some way

3/ That there is no over-riding encumbrance on the data-set, allowing
someone to claim rights over it even though it's been collected
independently rather than copied.

Point 1 is easy to address, you just have any contributors agree to
either place their contributions in the public domain, or licence them
under a suitable free licence. If this hasn't been done so far, then
the current data may not be ok to use. Point 2 may require some user
education as to what is and isn't acceptable. But for this particular
case, there is the more important issue that the background map is
from Google. As far as I'm aware, Google claims rights in any
coordinates obtained by clicking on a Google map. This could well be a
show-stopper for the existing data, but could be fixed for new
submissions by switching to an open base map such as OSM.

As for Point 3, I would say that anyone would have a rather hard job
claiming any rights over the locations of publicly viewable bright red
boxes that someone else has collected individually. But that's not to
say they wouldn't try. (This could be a problem for all sorts of data
in OSM though, including any Canadian postboxes already present.) The
case is significantly weaker than for postcodes though, since we're
talking about coordinates of physical objects that anyone could obtain
independently, rather than crowd-sourced copying of data that could
only have come initially from Canada Post's official list.

I don't know what the current coverage of post boxes in Canada is like
in OSM. One option that might be worth considering is for him to run a
site that allows contributors to directly add a postbox node in OSM,
along the lines of http://onosm.org/ but adding the data live through
a dedicated account. (You'd need to watch for vandalism though.) And
then for the database his site uses for showing the locations to come
directly from a regularly updated OSM data export. That way we don't
have to worry about importing data, and his site gets the benefit of
any boxes already in OSM or added to OSM in the future by other means.

Hope that helps,

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker