[OSM-newbies] Copyright for street names

[Rick Collins]

At 01:49 PM 1/6/2008, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>Andy Allan wrote:
>
> > So I would say 6 is the best option, and you should try to do this
> > whenever possible. 1, 2, and 4 are OK. 3, 5 and 7 should be avoided.
> >
> > This kind of discussion should be continued on our legal-talk mailing
> > list, which exists for exactly this purpose.
>
>And here's the cc: to do exactly that.
>
>I concur with several posters that 3 ("You remember a business' name
>and look it up in the phone book, there you find the street name") is
>_not_ ok in the EU and possibly other jurisdictions.
>
>If you do it for one or two places, and every other OSM contributor
>does the same, that's 20-40,000 extractions from a database (whether
>it be a paper phone book or an electronic one). That is "significant"
>and therefore an infringement of EU database right.
>
>cheers
>Richard

In the US, phone books have two parts, the White pages which are the 
telephone company's data base and the Yellow pages which are paid 
listings plus advertisements.  If a company has paid to have its info 
listed in a Yellow page advertisement (which the listing company 
owns), I can not imagine that the company who published the book 
could (or would) claim copyright on that data.  Are the phone books 
set up the same way elsewhere?

So shouldn't it be ok to get the addresses of businesses from Yellow 
page ads regardless of the phone company's claim on the data in the 
rest of the book?


gnuarm