[OSM-talk] Data copied from Google Maps

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 4 November 2012 21:20, Christopher Woods (IWD)
<christof en infinitus.co.uk> wrote:
> On 04/11/2012 16:48, Andrew MacKinnon wrote:
>>
>> In my opinion, copying from Google Street View is still a legally
>> dubious thing to do. There is no formal licensing agreement with
>> Google that I know of. It is perfectly fine to capture data by taking
>> pictures yourself, but relying on Google Street View cars to take
>> those pictures is legally dubious. Google Street View is often
>> outdated anyway. Copying from Google Maps is clearly not allowed.
>>
>> I realize that we don't want to alienate users, but I think that OSM
>> still needs to be strict about deleting contributions from legally
>> dubious sources. Many new users simply don't realize that copying from
>> Google is not allowed, and may have made many other contributions from
>> legal sources (which will not be deleted). In other cases, users don't
>> realize that there are sources that OSM is legitimately allowed to
>> copy from - e.g. I have had to explain to users in Canada that copying
>> road names from Google is not OK, but copying from Geobase and Canvec
>> is perfectly acceptable.
>
> This is an interesting discussion about where to draw the line. To use one
> example: I could walk to the end of my street right now and look at the
> street sign; I could then do the same for all neighbouring roads in my
> locality. However, I could go to Google Street View and do the same thing.
>
> For simple pieces of factual data like that, obviously in the public domain
> before Google began to compile their own imagery, my gut feeling is that
> this is arguably OK to do in a pinch. Whilst not preferred, and 'trumpable'
> by another user submitting empirical observations, it's not a clear
> infringement of Google's cache of data as they never had exclusive access to
> the information prior to their own compilation efforts.
>
> You can obtain lists of street names from Royal Mail - heck, you can scrape
> them from PD mapping sources. The road network hasn't changed that
> dramatically in 100 years, save for trunk roads and infill in increasingly
> urban areas (IMO).
>
> However, 1:1 copying of complete topographical or road network information
> is far past the mark and also both a clear infringement of copyrighted
> materials and the licence under which access to said data is granted by the
> owner(s).
>
> If you copied Street View information wholesale, it's also a similarly clear
> infringement of licensed, copyrighted materials. Just the street names,
> however, isn't (on its own) a capital offence nor an obvious infringement of
> copyright.

It doesn't really matter whether the information is copyrightable.
You can only access this information through the Google website and to
use it you have to agree to the terms of use of that website,
including agreeing that you wouldn't systematically extract data from
it.

I agree incompatible data should be removed from OSM but it makes no
sense for a normal user to go around deleting it because they have no
way to remove the information from the odbl database, which includes
the history of edits.  This can be done by "redacting" that data and
the DWG currently has this ability.  Also, as the beginning of this
thread showed, a user is unlikely to know what licenses or agreements
there are between the source and the OSM contributor.

Cheer