[OSM-talk] Google Street View copyright question

[Eric Wolf]

Yes - but you are inherently deriving the location from the images
georeferencing. If the image were provided outside of the context of Google
Streets, you might be able to make the claim that looking at the image
doesn't violate the copyright. But the fact that the image contains
geospatially significant information and is geolocated makes this quite
dubious - and best avoided.
-Eric

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Eric B. Wolf                    New! 720-334-7734
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography



On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 4:23 PM, David Muir Sharnoff <lists at dave.sharnoff.org
> wrote:

> Google's forbids many things, but looking at an image and noting the
> turn restrictions (or other content) that you can see within it is not
> mentioned.   Such a use is not covered by "2 (b) copy, translate,
> modify, or make derivative works of the Content or any part thereof;"
> since the turn restrictions are something that you can see in the
> image -- not the image itself.
>
> -Dave
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Jonathan
> Bennett<openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > talk at openstreetmap.org
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> >
> >
>
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