[OSM-talk] Splitting a way may completely hide a taint

[Nathan Edgars II]

Say you start out with a tainted way that you're improving to better 
match imagery (and are not dealing with license change implications, 
only with improving the map data). You split it near an end, delete the 
longer part, and redraw the entire way from scratch. The tags and 
relation memberships of the original way remain but none of the nodes do 
(except possibly intersections with other ways).

The problem here is that, depending on which end you split it at and 
which portion you delete, the redrawn way has a one-half probability of 
being a new way and a one-half probability of having the same ID as the 
old way (in JOSM and Potlatch; other editors may differ).

These two cases are clearly legally identical (hence this does not 
belong on legal-talk). But they give the opposite result in any existing 
license status tool.

So what's the deal? Will the OSMF be digging deep into the history and 
finding any way that's been split from a tainted way (in which case the 
number of tainted ways is vastly underreported)? Will the OSMF take the 
easy way out and accept these ways as untainted if and only if they were 
lucky enough to come from the correct half? Or will all such ways be 
accepted if all nodes are clean?