[OSM-newbies] Copyright for street names

[Andy Robinson (blackadder)]

Rick Collins wrote:
>Sent: 06 January 2008 7:58 PM
>To: newbies at openstreetmap.org
>Cc: Legal Talk
>Subject: Re: [OSM-newbies] Copyright for street names
>
>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?
>

The policy for OpenStreetMap is that we don't taint the database with
information that has come from a copyrighted source. Therefore the answer to
the question depends upon whether there is indeed any copyright on the
particular telephone book in question. If this is not evidently printed in
the book itself I'd still want to call up the publisher and get their
written permission before I felt comfortable about using it as a source.
It's not for us to guess the copyright status on the information. It's for
us to ascertain it before we blindly assume it might be ok.

Cheers

Andy