[OSM-talk] Adding the full name of a business

[Toby Murray]

The day someone tells me that I have to collect signatures from every
business I map is the day I stop contributing to OSM. With all respect
to local laws... that is just plain ridiculous, lawyers be damned.
Where would this archive of signatures even exist? Does OSMF have a
secret bunker under a mountain somewhere with rows and rows of
climate-controlled filing cabinets? This is not even close to being a
reasonable burden to place on casual mappers which I keep hearing we
want to recruit more of.

Presumably most businesses would WANT to increase their exposure to
their potential customers and OSM lets them do that for free. If
someone ever actually has a problem with their business being listed
and complains about it (which I find highly unlikely unless the data
is actually wrong) then they can easily be removed from the database.

As far as copyright goes, using signs on the street or receipts from a
business has got to be one of the absolute smallest copyright concerns
for OSM. I mean hell... I know for a fact that there is data in OSM
that was based on google/yahoo/bing maps. I recently stopped a new
mapper from doing this. I am by no means a complete copyright
anarchist but at some point it just becomes absurd to treat every bit
of paper with a dab of ink on it as holy property.

The issue with streetview is that it contains potentially personally
identifying information in the form of pictures. I don't think people
have a problem with information from business signs being collected
and mapped. It's the people, cars and other things that are captured
in the picture in addition to the data itself.

Toby


On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Peter Körner <osm-lists at mazdermind.de>
> wrote:
>>
>> If there is a plate with name and phone number then this information is
>> definitely public available without any restrictions.
>>
>
> That's not true. What you can freely see from the street is not necesseraly
> something you can collect and publish somewhere else. As it was said, this
> depends on the local jurisdiction. Look for instance what's happening to
> StreetView facing complaints in many countries ...
>
> Pieren
>
>
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