[OSM-talk] Sourcing street names - source example and question about who can input what

[dies38061 at mypacks.net]

I not long ago received a photocopy of a hand-drawn map of the roadway network within a company's manufacturing site, complete with street names (no, I'm not a spy :-) - it's all legal and above board).  The streets were most all present in the TIGER data import, but lacked names.  However, I chose not to take the names from the tantalizing piece of paper and affix them to the streets in OSM.  I am pretty sure that the business would not have minded, and would likely have said "yes" if I'd put the question to them about inputting the information.  That hand-drawn map, though, was a product of an employee of the business, and the work of the employees as part of their job is owned by the business; therefore, there is an implicit copyright held by the business on the information in that hand-drawn map.

This raises a related interesting situation.  Let's say that the business is indeed interested in putting their street names onto OSM so that they can use the OSM map for internal purposes and they want to dot the i's and cross the t's properly.  Your typical employee with this information could not input it on her own, though, because the individual employee does not have the power to suspend the copyright on the information and release it under CCSA.  Rather, such release would need to go through internal legal channels and be approved by someone who does have the authority to sign away the copyright; such authority may be vested jointly in the head legal counsel and the President of the business.

Thus, what began with a hand-drawn map with street names ends up at the top of the business food chain and slides back down the chain with a legal rider as long as your arm disavowing the company of any harm which may arise from the use of this information should it turn out to be incorrect or out of date.

Looking at accessible street signs suddenly seems much easier in light of this. 

Be careful with that, though.  If there are street signs on the manufacturing site, could the employee walk the site, collect the information manually, then input it into OSM?  Probably not (if they want to keep working there), because that would be using their privileged access to the site to collect business intelligence and subsequently release it.  In principle, this is no different from peering over a colleague's shoulder then emailing a competitor with the information so collected.

--ceyockey