[Tagging] landuse:illegal and illegal:yes/no

Peter Gervai grinapo at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 15:46:03 BST 2011


On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 15:21, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> Under the usual rule-of-thumb, to map what's visible on the ground
> (signed or built),

Like smoothness=, incline=, etc?

> "Illegal use", in those words or similar. (Or tagged so by a suitably
> free Govt GIS file.)

Incidentally sometimes that's the case, as it turned out.

> Anything else, an OSM member is making a value judgment and OSM is
> publishing it as a fact, which has legal consequences in most
> countries. OSM has a legal entity in UK which is democracy most
> favorable to libel tourists, where Truth is NOT a defense. (The new
> coalition gov't is looking at reform but don't bet you assets on it.)

But then you can be sued on virtually anything, like stating there is
a road when the owner thinks otherwise, or state its smoothness as
"horrible" which is clearly offensive, etc. Obviously it's quite
acceptable if you request the addendum for this tag not to be used in
the UK. :-)

But then again you are worried about the word and not its use, so
since you seem to be a genuine englishman, please utilise your native
vocabulary to suggest an alternative _word_ to use which conveys the
same meaning without suggesting that this status is defined by law
instead of common sense or otherwise. I'm no native English speaker so
you may be better suited to pick the proper word. (Prohibited and
debated was two suggestion which I didn't really like.)

> IANAL (but have enough knowledge to be dangerous)

Then you must be well aware that it's quite hard to sue someone who is
not related to either publishing or creating the data in question? And
I hope it's important as well that someone offended should notify the
provider first. And explaining that a technicality like map tagging
can be libelious to a judge may not be as easy as it looks first, I
presume.

Peter



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