[OSM-talk] Google Street View copyright question

[David Earl]

On 09/09/2009 12:07, Pieren wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Tom Hughes<tom at compton.nu> wrote:
>> Because (in the EU) Database Right kicks in and prohibits "substantial
>> extraction".
>>
>> Tom
> 
> If someone starts to "copy" the photos themselves, yes you are right.
> But here, we speak about reading a street sign on a picture, not
> copying the picture.

There's another aspect to this which I think rules out doing this: in 
order to be useful to us, the streetname has to be in a photo for which 
we know the location. That means it has been geolocated with respect to 
a map, which means the photo is itself a derived work. We are in effect 
using the copyrighted location, albeit indirectly, so whatever the 
situtation wrt the content of the photo, we are potentially infringing 
the copyright of the map used to geolocate it. This applies even to 
CCbySA photos gelocated on flickr etc, unless they were located using 
OSM in the first place, or by GPS. In StreetView they were presumably 
geolocated wrt a GPS, so that may, individually (but not collectively, 
for database reasons) just be a fact rather than a derivation.

But as other people have said, it hardly matters as (a) we want to be 
not just clean, but squeaky clean, and (b) if someone with lots of money 
sues, it hardly matters what the true legal position is.

David