[Talk-GB] OSM with Wikidata: now covers UK and Ireland

[Richard Fairhurst]

Colin Smale wrote:
> As we are not copying the content from Wikipedia/Wikidata, but just 
> a reference

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple.

The matching is done by co-ordinates. The co-ordinates in Wikidata could be
held to be information copyrighted by Google. Consequently you could argue
that the matching - "the selection or the arrangement of the contents of the
database", to use the language from the Database Directive - is itself a
derivative of Google's map data.

To be clear, I'm not arguing one way or another - I've probably studied the
related issues as much as anyone on this list and it's not obvious to me
which way it would fall. But anything with the potential to affect such a
large amount of OSM data in the UK needs a thorough legal review, lest we
inadvertently encumber thousands of uses of OSM with Google IP.

cheers
Richard



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