[OSM-talk] Abnormal votings on military objects in RU wiki part; PocketGIS madness

[Nic Roets]

Frederik,

He did not give an exhaustive list of all the censorship laws, rules
and regulations of his country. Rather he was just giving a little bit
of background information.

If there is something in the Russian DB that their government wants us
to remove, then we should remove it. Otherwise it could escalate to
the point where they block osm.org, or even have an edit war between
us and hackers employed by the KGB^H^H^H Russian Intelligence. The
entities in question are not routable, nor is there any point in
searching for them, so clearly it is not worth it.

If someone wants to publish Russian military information, let them use
sites designed for that purpose, like wikileaks.

Regards,
Nic

2010/4/11 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> Hi,
>
> Kirill Bestoujev wrote:
>> We (PocketGis team) are currently making some efforts to prove to our
>> state authorities that OSM data can be used by anyone, in any way. This
>> is only possible if that data contains nothing that violates Russian
>> legislation.
>
> You have just explained that using maps published by unlicensed parties
> is not legal *generally*. This seems to be completely independent of
> whether or not military installations are depcited.
>
>> Our proposal (formulated AFTER the vote on wiki was started by other osm
>> members) was not to remove OBJECTS from OSM, but to replace the tag
>> military by something like landuse=industrial + access=no
>
> This is not acceptable. A military use area is not industrial.
>
>> That is not true. We do care of OSM.
>
> I think you should simply run a mirror of OSM data - it is not too
> difficult to set up something like I did on download.geofabrik.de where
> you can download OSM data for various areas - and make any replacement
> you think is required *in that data*.
>
> Or if you only need tiles, then make a rendering which omits what you
> think is problematic.
>
>> By the way - the author of the originating e-mail is not a Russian
>> citizen...
>
> It seems that not being a Russian citizen gives one the required
> distance to view this matter clearly. It is commendable that you are
> trying to make OSM "palatable" to Russian authorities but that must not
> come at the price of modifying OSM itself to suit them.
>
> I can understand your point but you must understand that if OSM were to
> respect national laws, we would (as John Smith has pointed out) have to
> delete all our data in those countries where community mapping is illegal!
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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