[Talk-us] Integrating our open source data into OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09.11.2017 02:53, Brian May wrote:
> Its critical to know where the lat/longs came from. For example, if they
> came from Google Maps - then its a no go, because Google's licensing is
> incompatible with OSM. Their geocodes are not public domain, etc. Same
> thing applies to many / most other commercial geocoding services. If you
> don't know how the lat/longs were derived, then that is probably a show
> stopper as well.

I've enterered a random sample of addresses from this data set into
Google for geocoding and ended up with the exact same lat/lon in about
half of cases - but I only tested a handful.

Of course it is totally possible that a public domain geocoding source
is used by both Cybo and Google which would lead to both having the same
data without Cybo having copied from Google.

As a further explanation to Sean, in case you're not familiar with the
legal situation; while deriving "facts" from Google's database and
re-using them in your own data set will often not violate copyright
(because "facts are free"), it can violate database protection which is
a different legal concept that protects a database from repeated
extraction even if the individual extracted bits are not copyrighted.
This concept doesn't exist in the US to my knowledge, but someone using
such a database in, for example, the EU, could be sued by the database
owner. That's why OSM must avoid adding location data that has been
derived from non-free sources.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"