[Talk-us] Someone copying from other maps

Rihards richlv at nakts.net
Thu Oct 5 06:24:48 UTC 2017


On 2017.10.05. 02:25, GeoKitten wrote:
> Hello everyone. A few days ago, an OSM user in my ares (Pittsburgh, PA)
> sent me
> a private message in which they admitted to copying from two sources. First
> they said they were copying from a map of the CSX intermodal facility in
> Pittsburgh:
> "The challenging part was the CSX Intermodal facility. I took the PDF from
> their public documents on their website and extracted the engineering plan
> image, then used the PicLayers plugin to scale and orient that image
> accurately, then traced from that. I'm a little proud of that one."
> 
> Presumably this map is copyrighted so it's a serious issue.
> 
> They also said they were copying from the county address data:
> 
> "It's also a lot faster with the address points from the county overlaid
> (remangled through osmfilter, pull it out per municipality, and then rewrite
> the tags and values into OSM-appropriate format), and with some of the JOSM
> alignment tricks."
> 
> This is a government dataset that is probably public domain but whose
> copyright
> status hasn't been verified. It might be considered an unauthorized import
> though.
> 
> I'm not sure how to handle this. First of all, this was via PM so I'm
> not sure
> if I should reveal their identiy. Should I?
> 
> Second, I want to clarify that they don't appear malicious, just uninformed
> of the rules. They mentioned their copying in a positive context as if they
> didn't know it was forbidden. I don't want to be a snitch but I know the OSM
> community takes copyright issues very seriously.

it might make sense to clarify the copyright status of these sources to
see what data can be kept. in parallel, inform the user about the
problem, and email dwg.
-- 
 Rihards



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