[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Russ Nelson wrote:
> What work or creativity did Google do towards the existence of 
> that particular point?

Google's imagery suppliers collected and rectified the imagery. "For over a
hundred years, English courts have held that a significant expenditure of
labour is sufficient" - that's, er, Wikipedia saying that. If they'd
rectified them differently, your 14 digits would be different.

Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily a view I wholly subscribe to (if
you could actually be bothered to look through the wiki and the 8zn prior
mailing list discussions, you'd see I've put stuff on there with a more
liberal view of this). Clearly some people don't - Yahoo, for example.

But Ivan has it right. Google's imagery suppliers could well take that view
if they wanted to, and OSM's attitude has always been "we are whiter than
white". Don't forget we have _expressly_ asked Google, in the form of Ed
Parsons at SOTM, and he has _expressly_ said, sorry, no, we don't have those
rights to give away.

Yet... we're forgetting something:

> To think that Google has ANY copyright ownership of points chosen 
> off their aerial photographs simply boggles the mind.

Er, how come we're suddenly just talking about aerial imagery?

The Wikipedia page I quoted says "Google Maps". It actually recommends you
use their API and their geocoder, too: that looks to be against their ToS to
me, though I'm sure you'll find some way to disagree.

It even provides a handy tool for you to do it.
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/universimmedia/geo/loc.htm . That _directly_
extracts from their geocoder. Nothing about clicking on imagery there; I
type in my address and it gives me a lat and long. Wikipedia also recommends
you do a web search for the city name together with "latitude" and
"longitude" so, hey, why stop at Google? You can infringe on lots of other
people's content, too!

With all that in mind, I reckon any court would conclude that it is very
likely there has been large-scale extraction of features. 

But evidently I'm being an armchair lawyer:

> But nobody wants to talk about the hard stuff.  Everybody just 
> wants to be an armchair lawyer rather than exercize their brain. 

Oh, don't be so patronising. And you're not? Please.

Actually, I think an OSMer said it best on Twitter.

"Openstreetmap is about gathering map data and sharing it. Some people seem
desperate to import data from anywhere. GATHER IT YOURSELF."

And with that, I shall stop posting the same old stuff that's been said so
many times before, and go and gather some data. I recommend it. :)

cheers
Richard
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