[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Russ Nelson wrote:
> In fact, we don't know this.  And since Google didn't create those 
> lat/lon pairs, the Wikipedia editor did, Google had no participation 
> in the act of creation, and thus no copyright claim.
> 
> You guys have some really weird ideas about copyright.

Yeah, but by "you guys" you actually mean Europe, and in particular, the UK.
I mean, your paragraph above makes absolute sense for someone who knows a
bit about the US legal framework and US legal history. I could read Feist vs
Rural and Mason vs Montgomery Data and say exactly the same thing.

The trouble is that I'm sitting in a stone cottage in a quiet Cotswold
country town opposite a pub serving five real ciders and a comfortable
hourly InterCity to Lond

- scratch that -

The trouble is that I'm sitting in England and it doesn't, frankly, apply to
me or my compatriots. We don't have Feist vs Rural, we have Ordnance Survey
vs the Automobile Association and all your "act of creation" stuff means,
really, bugger all here. We have the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine instead. It
sucks harder than a Hoover, but it's there.

So there are three important OSM principles here.

One is that we are whiter than white - that's what we're here for. We don't
push the legal envelope. If someone else wants to, that's fine. But we don't
want to be the test case. I strongly suspect, though I stand to be
contradicted, that CloudMade doesn't want us to be the test case either.

The second is that we have the manpower of crowdsourcing (and the power of
Greyskull). Yeah, we could import a few dozen POIs from Wikipedia. Oh joy.
Alternatively we could get our 100,000 mappers to map them themselves. I
suppose, worst case scenario, it might take up to a month.

The third, of course, is that anything decided without community consensus
(cf Cyprus edit war) risks unleashing a bot arms race.

cheers
Richard
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