[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Wed May 6 07:54:16 BST 2009


Hi,

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 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.

Of course Russ's argument is that you do not have to be given those 
rights, by Ed Parsons or his upstream providers, and so the fact that 
Google doesn't have those rights assigned by contract (or is unwilling 
to assign them to you by contract) is irrelevant.

> 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!

Which brings me to an interesting question. We currently have a 
long-running theft investigation in Germany where the suspects are twin 
brothers. The fact that it is impossible to accuse one or the other 
seems to be a major complication for lawyers (it seems you cannot have a 
legal case against "one of you two"). Now I wonder what happens if:

* If I google for the coordinates of something
* find the same coordinates on 5 web pages
* use them
* it later turns out all these 5 pages have copied from google and the 
coordinates are an easter egg

Who, then, has a legal case against me? I haven't lifted anything off 
Google, so it cannot be them; and the other 5 will have a hard time to 
prove I took something from them? And is something still illegal if it 
is impossible to bring a case against it?

> But evidently I'm being an armchair lawyer:

Welcome to the club.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




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