[OSM-talk] Illegal activity

Ian Dees ian.dees at gmail.com
Thu Oct 29 00:29:37 GMT 2009


On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

> Valent Turkovic writes:
>  > http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=40148
>  >
>  > what to do with OSM mappers like these guys in this post?
>  >
>  > They say that they are using Google Earth images :(
>
> A couple of points:
>
>  o Copyright gets infringed typically.  Criminal copyright is a much
>    more serious matter, typically involving massive distribution of
>    copied articles.  Thus "illegal" is not the right term to use.
>
>  o It's dubious to claim a copyright on an aerial photo. Anybody else
>    attempting to photograph the same thing would come up with
>    *exactly* the same photograph (modulo season, weather, and changes
>    over time).
>  o It's *really* unclear that tracing an aerial photograph infringes
>    copyright of the aerial photograph.  No portion of the photograph
>    is included in the tracing, and tracing any aerial photograph
>    would result in the same trace.
>
> All of that said, current OSM policy is not to trace without
> permission.
>

Copyright has nothing to do with this*. It's against Google's Terms of
Service to trace from any of their data: satellite or roads, Google Earth or
Google Maps.

Although it may/may not be "illegal", it is definitely a breach of contract.
That does add another dimension to this debate: OSM isn't breaking a
contract with Google, the user adding the data is. Google would therefore
have to take action against the user (and would probably require that the
data they put in OSM be removed).

* Ok, it has lots to do with it, but let's deal with breaking the ToS before
we venture into the limbo-land of database copyright.
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