[Talk-GB] Postcodes map

[Alexander Wright]

On Thursday 29 Mar 2007, John McKerrell wrote:
> On 29 Mar 2007, at 02:10, Laurence Penney wrote:
> > John McKerrell wrote:
> >>>> I've made a slippy map showing postcode areas:
> >>>> http://beerwarmer.randomjunk.co.uk/osm/postcodes/

> Though I'm a big fan of collecting postcodes, and generally get them
> from roadsigns, I'm not sure there really is a non-tainted source of
> postcode data. The postcodes are decided by the post office aren't
> they? I have heard that the base data is copyrighted, it's not like
> you can derive a postcode from any other source, e.g. if it was some
> sort of hash of the road name and location. Perhaps the first part is
> decided by the council and the last part by the post office, I don't
> know. I'd be interested if anyone had any solid knowledge on the
> subject?

As far as I understood, postcodes themselves are, in effect public domain.
The mapping of a postcode to a physical address, such as a GPS coordinate, is 
copyrighted data by whoever has done the work.

Thus if you take the postcode of your house and publish it with a GPS 
coordinate, or indeed any other freely available postcode together with it's 
GPS, that's fine.

Other data sources may be copyright though.

Alex.