[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

Russ Nelson russ at cloudmade.com
Wed May 6 03:29:59 BST 2009


On May 5, 2009, at 5:47 PM, Richard Fairhurst wrote:

>
> Russ Nelson wrote:
>> Fine enough, and who sweated hardest to click in a particular point
>> on  a Google Map?  Google?  Or the Wikipedia editor[...]?
>
> Sweat-of-the-brow doesn't mean that. It doesn't mean that "A did  
> some work,
> but B did more, so B owns the copyright". _Both_ A and B own some  
> copyright.

What work or creativity did Google do towards the existence of that  
particular point?  Given the coordinates of a particular point, how  
would Google take those numbers into court and say "Your honour, those  
numbers belong to us."  Particularly when Google had no idea that  
those numbers existed before they were published in Wikipedia.  Can  
you conceive of ANY legal system which would allow someone to claim  
copyright protection on 14 digits that they weren't aware of until  
they were published by someone else?  With a straight face?  No  
pulling my leg now, this is a serious conversation.

To think that Google has ANY copyright ownership of points chosen off  
their aerial photographs simply boggles the mind.  That would be like  
me taking a photograph of something (which is clearly a copyrightable  
work), you choosing to say something about a particular point 5.3785  
inches from the bottom and 7.3992 inches from the left, and me  
claiming that 5.3785, 7.3992 infringes my copyright.  I'm like WTF???

--
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





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