[OSM-talk] Maps and names

[Nick Whitelegg]

On Friday 01 Sep 2006 11:57, Nicola Ranaldo wrote:
> > Russ, your comment about being a postman in the past really made me think
> > that there must be a huge number of retired post men and women, bus and
> > taxi drivers, milkmen and the like who all have a really good memory of
> > what street is named what and where certain points of interest are
> > located. Give them a printed OSM map missing the names (even if they are
> > present now in the data) and they would be a great resource for gathering
> > correlative data. It might also be a very stimulation exercise for them.
> >
> > Question is, how do we find them? Is there a journal for retired postal
> > workers for instance?
>
> What is the limit in deriving a work?
> Are you sure the memory of the taxi driver is not filled with derived work
> from copyrigthed map?

IANAL again but quite possibly many people first learnt things from 
copyrighted maps. Surely there must be some common sense here. If someone 
learnt something from a copyrighted map when they were a child, surely that 
would be acceptable? There must be limits. Even if someone else told you a 
name, *they* may have learnt it from a copyrighted map.

If that's the case we may as well forget about adding any names to the map 
unless we have documentary evidence of it. Even if we have known the name all 
our lives. I'd sincerely hope common sense would prevail here.

Nick