[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Jochen Topf]

On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:59:51PM +0200, Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote:
> El Martes, 5 de Mayo de 2009, Russ Nelson escribió:
> > 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 [...] OMG, I'm practically 
> > DRIPPING with sweat off my brow just thinking about it.
> 
> OK, but *you* tell that to the Google Lawyer Legion(tm)(beta).

I don't think we have to worry about that. Google hasn't sued Wikipedia
yet. And Wikipedia has been distributing all those points in bulk for
years.

Google itself has taken the Wikipedia points and put the into a Google
Earth layer. So they can't argue that they didn't know.

Now that Wikipedia is switching to CC-BY-SA I don't see any legal reason
why we can't exchange data.

Come on, people, don't be afraid all the time of something that
theoretically maybe could eventually happen. We should not in
anticipatory obedience cede the ground to everybody who claims any kind
of right just because he thinks he should have it. If there is a
reasonable claim, we have to act, of course, but not because of some
theoretical possibility where the alleged copyright holder didn't even
say anything.

If you really want to be whiter than white I suggest you scroll around
the existing OSM maps and start emailing all those people doing large
scale imports and not having any documentation about where that data was
coming from. Ask them for a full pedigree of this data back to the guy
doing the surveying. Written, signed and in triplicate.

This is no super-white project and it can't be. Its a community project
and there is not much control about what people are doing. If and only
if there is a problem, we have to handle it (and do so quickly), but not
before. Wikipedia has been having those issues for years and has been
handling them well. Sure there are letters from laywers etc. all the
time and they look at those cases, document them, maybe delete data or
lock access temporarily. That works. Judges see the effort they put in
to protect copyright where there is some copyright to protect. I suggest
we follow the same strategy instead of announcing that we are "white"
where we aren't and coming up with insurmountable hurdles in other
cases.

Jochen
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Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298