[Openstreetmap] London locations

[Richard Fairhurst]

(Please prefix any and all lines in this reply with an implied :( - I'm 
not trying to justify the situation, just explaining how it is in the 
UK.)

On 10 Oct 2005, at 05:36, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>
>> Steve is right. If you georeference a place by using a
>> copyrighted map, such as Google Maps, you are creating a derived
>> work from that map. [1] Ergo the data is not free. [2]
>>
>> [1] ...under the prevalent interpretation of UK law. You are of
>> course welcome to pay a lawyer to come up with a less sucky
>> interpretation. :)
>
> What sources do you have for this statement?  It sounds highly
> improbable.

Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988, as subsequently modified by EU 
instruments and others: 
www.patent.gov.uk/copy/legislation/legislation.pdf is a useful 
reference. To take one example off the top of my head (it's early and I 
should be going to work...):

TeleAtlas (who provide the relevant Google mapping), and potentially 
_their_ suppliers (which most probably means Ordnance Survey), have 
database right in the gazetteer used to draw placenames on the Google 
map. This is the big database table which contains information like 
your Glasgow lat/long for every single town and village in the country, 
and OS sell this as a commercial product.

By clicking on a Google map to find a lat/long for a load of towns and 
villages referenced in Wikipedia, you are republishing information from 
this database. This is a direct contravention of a piece of UK 
legislation: "A person infringes database right in a database if, 
without the consent of the owner of the right, he extracts or 
re-utilises all or a substantial part of the contents of the database." 
(Remember the database is owned by TeleAtlas/maybe OS, _not_ Google.)

Daniel's point about electoral boundaries is a useful one. Those 
electoral boundaries are derived works, too. They've mostly been 
obtained by drawing lines on an Ordnance Survey map, which is 
copyrighted. For the local council, there's absolutely no problem in 
this, because they get their OS mapping free through the 
Pan-Governmental Agreement. It just hobbles any of the rest of us 
wanting to do good works with it.

This is exactly why we need Openstreetmap - and as a matter of some 
urgency, a 1:1m map which can be used for really simple georeferencing 
applications such as this one.

Right now I believe the safest choice is to build such applications on 
DCW/VMAP0 rather than Google Maps, sadly.

Richard