[OSM-talk] Google Street View copyright question

[Dan Karran]

2009/9/9 Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com>:

> Back in March, Ed Parsons pointed out [0] that since StreetView images are
> Google-owned, if someone asked nicely-enough we could get them to give us a
> license to explicitly map based on the streetview images (similar to the
> explicit license we have with Yahoo).

I'm not sure if anybody took this further with Ed or with Google back
around the time of that tweet, but I sent him a quick email earlier to
see what the status was here, and what we would be allowed to use
Street View images for, if anything.

His response was basically that it's fine to check our existing facts
using the imagery from Street View, but it's not allowed - due to
their license - to do any mass data extraction from the images that
would then be republished.

>From Ed:
===
This remains a grey area of ip law, if it is the case of checking from
the photography itself facts such as the name of a building, that
would be ok.. there are some key points in the Terms of Service which
are useful..

"..you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any
other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical
latitude and longitude co-ordinates."

This is really saying you are not allowed to do mass tracing of
features that are then made available to third parties.
===

I came across a situation the other day where I was adding the address
details of a pub[1] to the map and noticed that the street name (Edis
St, from their website) didn't match up with the name of the street in
OSM[2] (Edith St).

>From what Ed's suggested, Street View could probably have been used to
confirm the local name[3] (ignore the armed police [4] ;) - to see
whether the pub had a typo on their site, or we had a typo in our
database - without having to go out and re-survey.


[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/265649578
[2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/8400167
[3] http://tr.im/yfAo
[4] http://tr.im/yfAU


Cheers,
Dan
ps - I'm not a lawyer :)

-- 
Dan Karran
dan at karran.net
www.dankarran.com