[OSM-talk] Default access rights (was: Re: Use of OSM data without attribution)

[Andy Townsend]

On 22/08/2020 08:56, Simon Poole wrote:
> To add to what Andy has already said, complaints about people using
> private paths etc are relatively common, not a large number in absolute
> terms, but there tend to be a couple each month which either land with
> the DWG, or LWG, or naturally with the local community (I've handled a
> couple of them with a different hat on locally, but they are rare).

Over the last 6 months the DWG's had 46 tickets created mentioning 
"Alltrails".  Others will go elsewhere (e.g. as Martijn described 
previously).  For comparison we've had 19 directly mentioning 
"instagram" in that period (though that may undercount - we sometimes 
see complaints about "your map" from users of Facebook properties where 
it's not immediately clear what map they're complaining about, and what 
data on that map.


> AllTrails is just one of a handful of sources for such issues. I suspect
> that it is simply that such ways that are not part of the public road
> network tend to be less stable and sometimes not as well surveyed that
> makes this more likely to happen. On top of that right of way and access
> legislation tends to differ widely among countries, and what is
> completely OK in one may find you at the wrong end of a shotgun in
> another and that AllTrails et al are not very good in reflecting that.
> Example:  highway=track in the UK, which should probably default to
> access=private, but here and say in DE, in general would always have
> public access except if signposted differently or gated.

Yes - and it's even more confusing than that!  In Scotland (part of the 
UK but with a separate legal system) there is a "freedom to roam 
responsibly" similar to the Swedish "allemansrätten".  in the US there 
has been discussion going on about how people should tag imagery-derived 
service roads and how people should interpret that tagging state by state.

Best Regards,

Andy