[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[David Earl]

On 05/05/2009 20:36, Russ Nelson wrote:
> On May 5, 2009, at 3:11 PM, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> 
>> Adam Schreiber wrote:
>>> We don't know where the wikipedia users sourced their cooridinates  
>>> from.
>> Oh yes we do: Google Maps.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Obtaining_geographic_coordinates#Google_tools
>>
>> There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia-derived co-ordinates are  
>> suitable
>> for mass import into OSM.
> 
> 
> In fact, we don't know this.  And since Google didn't create those lat/ 
> lon pairs, the Wikipedia editor did, Google had no participation in  
> the act of creation, and thus no copyright claim.
> 
> You guys have some really weird ideas about copyright.

You think it's silly, we think it is silly, but it's not us, it's people 
like Ordnance Survey who claim this is a "derived work".

But when you say "what effort did the provider put in" in making a 
particular lat/lon, if you're getting that from their maps, you aren't 
doing it in a vacuum, you are choosing the point based on its 
relationship to what else you an see on the map (otherwise you wouldn't 
be using the map in the first place). And they've put lots of investment 
into preparing the map (in OS case, _our_ money as taxpayers!) so they 
are understandably protective of it.

Copyright isn't just about making verbatim copies. If you scan a photo, 
clearly you are infringing the photographer's copyright. But if you 
recreate a set, hire a similar model, and take your own picture then you 
are _still_ infringing copyright even though you took the picture.

There's a grey area when similar is really similar enough and there's a 
grey area with maps too as no one has really tested in court the map 
companies assertion that reading a coordinate off a map really is a 
derived work.

But the fact they make the assertion is largely why we exist in the 
first place. Importing potentially tainted data undermines the whole 
reason for our existence. Why bother importing - why not just use Google 
maps and save the effort?

David