[Foundation-l] Copyrighted maps and Derived works from copyrighted sources.

Wed Mar 31 20:56:12 UTC 2010

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 10:45 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 3/31/2010 1:30:39 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com writes:
>
>
>> (e) use the Products in a manner that gives you or any other person
>> access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of any Content, including but
>> not limited to numerical latitude or longitude coordinates, imagery,
>> and visible map data;
>>
>> ---Well if I import all the points from wikipedia, it is equivalent to
>> such a mass import.>>
>
> Yes we have examples where a legitimate copyright holder over-extends their
> claimed rights.  Regardless the USGS provides these exact same lat/long
> points.  If you're concerned than use them.

I have imported all the geonames for the areas that I am interested
in. That is not the issue.

The issue is the location of things that are only visible using high
quality sat images from googlemaps and co. We don't have those
positions for many of the locations and they are only available from
non free sources. Because wikipedia does not have a problem with them
being submitted in mass, it makes the total collection in effect not
usable for openstreetmap.

Now once you start to include points from google mapmaker it even gets
more interesting.

The content that is not available freely are things like business
listings, touristic points of interest, locations of interesting
buildings etc. I am sure there are a large number of those points that
are not available from any free source, except to go there with a gps
and record the location itself.

I think the best thing would be for wikipedia to really think hard
about this, and to make a policy that ensures the locations and maps
are also free from copyright issues so that we can use the information
in osm. Given the incredible user base, you might be able to collect
more unique points and have the truly usable. If wikipedia were to
call out to people to do some real mapping work and not just copying
points out of questionable sources, it would be a great benefit to the
total human knowledge.

thanks,

mike