[Talk-us-sfbay] Uploading sidewalks in San Jose, California

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Vivek and Harry:

I am not an attorney, though I am a citizen of the state of California.  In California, our state legislature passed into law the California Public Records Act (CPRA).  From its 1968 passage until the early 2010s, the law allowed anyone to request a public record (certain sensitive records like personnel records were specifically excluded) and perhaps for a small fee (reproduction costs, 1/4 hour of a clerk's "research time" or "reproduction labor costs," the price of a blank CD-ROM...) could obtain a copy of said record.  Roughly speaking, CPRA is the state-level equivalent of the federal (USA) level "Freedom of Information Act" which requires the US federal government to disclose its records/data, unless they are classified or specifically prohibited by law to disclose.  Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act.

In 2011, there were two lawsuits by divisions of the state itself (counties) which challenged the right of request of geographic data, specifically GIS records.  One was from Orange County, challenging the Sierra Club, an environmental group, though a somewhat-better-known suit/case is County of Santa Clara v. California First Amendment Coalition, 170 Cal. App. 4th 1301, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_of_Santa_Clara_v._California_First_Amendment_Coalition.

From that article:

The court rejected each of the county's arguments:

	• The court rejected that the records were exempted from release as "protected critical infrastructure information" under the Critical Infrastructure Information Act, as the county was only the provider of such resources, not the receiver, and hence the CII was irrelevant.
	• The court rejected the CPRA "catch all" exemption claim, concluding that the "public interest in disclosure outweighs the public interest in nondisclosure.
	• The court stated that as "a matter of first impression in California" there is "no statutory basis either for copyrighting the GIS basemap or for conditioning its release on a licensing agreement" and order that the "record thus must be disclosed as provided in the CPRA, without any such conditions or limitations" and ruled that it considered the general case of "interplay between copyright law and California's public records law, with the result that unrestricted disclosure is required."

The upshot for OSM is that all records (GIS records are quite explicitly protected as part of the Santa Clara case) produced the the state of California or its sub-entities (e.g. counties) are essentially open to anybody who asks for them.

As an OSM volunteer who "establishes legal ownership nexus" by requesting the records, after you receive them, you may do with them whatever you wish.  This includes submission to OSM.  Although, I do hope they get "polished up and 'prettied'" before this happens!  All I'm saying here is that some minor-to-moderate amount of editing in a good editor like JOSM can properly clean up the state-produced data so they meet OSM's conventions and criteria for uploading "good data."

Steve All, California
Frequent requestor, user and consumer of California-produced data (especially GIS data, as "the data are mine")
OSM Volunteer (and so, frequently, this turns into "the data are ours," where "we" is OSM).  Get it?  Got it!


> On Oct 21, 2017, at 5:41 PM, Vivek Bansal <3vivekb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Harry,
> 
> I don't know exactly why.  Minh or Stevea may be able to give you exact details.
> 
> I would also consider comparing the Mountain view data to the microsoft data.
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Microsoft_Building_Footprint_Data
> 
> Depending on how Mt. View created their layer, one may be better or more up to date than the other.
> 
> -Vivek
> 
> On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 5:25 PM Harry Cutts <eternal.linux at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Vivek,
> 
> Nice! I've linked to the import's Wiki page from the California/Imports page.
> 
> 
> We are using the San Jose data which has an ODbL compliant license (and any government data in California has the same).
> 
> Could you explain this? I'm interested in using some City of Mountain View building footprints myself, but was confused by their site's lack of detail on licensing. Do you mean that all city, county, and state open data is ODbL compliant by some California law?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Harry Cutts
> harrycutts.me.uk
<remainder redacted for brevity>