[OSM-talk] OTish : Free The Postcode via OSM

[Dave Stubbs]

On 29/07/07, Minty <mintywalker at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Very grey area. Certainly the co-ordinates returned by a Google Maps
> > search for a UK delivery point will be copyright Royal Mail, a dataset
> > which Google will licence, and pay a really hefty fee for it
>
> Sorry, I may have phrased the question vaugely....
>
> If I use Google/Yahoo/Live web search to find the website for some place I know:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=house+of+commons
>
> Use the venue's website (contact details) to get their postcode:
>
> http://www.parliament.uk/useful/address.cfm
> -> SW1A 0AA
>
> Assuming I know where that venue is, and open street map is detailed
> enough for me to find it
>
> http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=51.49957360415806&lon=-0.12480873446148448&zoom=16&layers=B000F000
>
> That tells me the Lat/Lng should be 51.49957, -0.12480
>
> Is that Okay / Fair Use?


You can use this to enter the postcode into the OSM database using the
postal_code tag. But you can't use it to enter the details onto free
the postcode.

FTP is a public domain resource, but data derived from an OSM map is
CC-BY-SA, so you can't include it. Unless at some point the license
gets changed to explicitly allow this. (there's a vague possibility
it's actually OK already -- but better safe than sorry... nobody here
is a lawyer...)

Basically it's a mess.


>
> And why, in this particular case, does Free The Postcode already have
> that postcode listed at 51.540485 -0.057268 which is more than a quick
> stroll from Big Ben?

There are some distinctly broken postcodes in the database. Try
reporting it on the website.

I have a map of where the derived boundaries are here:
http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/postcodes/

It can make it more obvious when there is a postcode out of place.