[OSM-talk] Google Street View copyright question

[Jonathan Bennett]

Anthony wrote:
> Is it okay to use Google Street View to confirm turning restrictions, 
> street names, etc?  This seems like an obvious "yes" to me, but then, 
> I would have said the same thing about tracing from a satellite photo, 
> so I'm not going to try to guess international copyright law.
The simple answer is that Street View is still protected by copyright, 
and that by using it you agree to Google's terms and conditions, so 
unless you have specific permission to derive data from it, it's safest 
to assume you can't. We're generally paranoid about copyright 
infringement because we don't want to jeopardise the entire project for 
the sake of a relatively small gain (Street View tends to cover urban 
areas, which are easier to survey in person anyway).

You also need to consider that Street View still uses Google Maps as 
part of its interface (and possibly for the overlaid navigation data), 
so it's affected by the licence on that data.

However, Google does own the Street View pictures themselves in their 
entirety. If they, with the location and bearing of each one was made 
available to OSM under terms compatible with CC-BY-SA (or ODBL), then we 
could use them. We would need a way of accessing the images that made no 
reference to any other geodata (so the standard web interface would be 
out). It's something we'd need to negotiate, but we can't do it at 
present, unfortunately.

J.