[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Russ Nelson]

On May 5, 2009, at 4:37 PM, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> We have the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine instead.

Fine enough, and who sweated hardest to click in a particular point on  
a Google Map?  Google?  Or the Wikipedia editor, who located the  
point, identified the point, clicked on the point, copied the lat and  
lon, edited the wikipedia page, pasted the lat and lon into the page  
in the correct format, OMG, I'm practically DRIPPING with sweat off my  
brow just thinking about it.  And how much sweating has Google  
contributed?  As much as they do when NOT serving up an image that  
somebody is clicking on.  In other words: not at all.

See what I mean about weird ideas?

> One is that we are whiter than white - that's what we're here for.  
> We don't
> push the legal envelope.


Bullshit.  Sorry, but it's bullshit.  Okay, so I have a railroad map  
of New York State which I could drop in toto into OSM.  I *claim* to  
have derived it from completely public-domain sources (USGS topo and  
DOQ).  But you don't know that.  You can't know that.  All you can do  
is close your eyes, let me import it, and hope that I'm not infringing  
some railroad mapping company's data.  The only way you're ever going  
to find out is if you get sued.  So much for not pushing the legal  
envelope.  And then to be publicly saying "Our license is shite; it's  
such shite that we're considering switching to a license whose ink is  
metaphorically still wet on the page."  That's not pushing the legal  
envelope??  And to be tracing off of Yahoo's maps based on something  
less than a signed contract on paper?  C'mon, Richard, you need a  
bigger shovel.

Bulk imports should always be done by a special user so that there is  
no problem removing the data should someone claim infringement.  But  
it's simply foolish to fail to import something simply because someone  
who isn't the copyright holder alleges that the data might be  
infringing.  You don't know; they don't know; the only one who really  
knows is the party doing the infringing and the infringed party, and  
the first one isn't talking.

No, I didn't think anybody was insane enough to worry about  
copyright.  There are FAR more important issues in doing an import  
from Wikipedia.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson