[OSM-talk] Okay, this is just cool (Lockport, NY)

[Ian Dees]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>wrote:

>
> [1] I actually think Google is being depressingly smart on this. They
> purposefully don't elucidate what you can and can't do. On the one hand,
> they want people to build geo apps and create indexable geodata on the
> Google Maps platform - even though some of this might well infringe their
> data/imagery suppliers' copyright. On the other, they don't want anyone -
> like OSM - to leverage their data to build their own platform. So they just
> say nothing. It's best for their business that way.
>
>
Another explanation for this ambiguity I heard while having lunch with some
Geo Googlers a year or two ago: they know that the legality of databases of
information (and especially geo data) is very ambiguous and no where near
court-tested. They are very stand-offish about this sort of stuff (see e.g.
Wikimapia) because they don't want to potentially lose a court battle, thus
removing one of their strategic advantages (owning their own data).
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