On 21 January 2014 18:18, Adam Williamson <ad...@happyassassin.net> wrote: > Hi, folks! I'm a new OSM contributor in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'm doing > some manual, on-the-ground, local knowledge mapping, but I'm also > looking for importable sources of important data types we're currently > missing locally. > > There is a guy running a project at http://wherepost.ca/ to produce a > crowdsourced database of post box locations in Canada. There's a > feedback page at http://wherepost.ca/about/ where I've been interacting > with him. I believe his intent is for this information to be free, but I > don't think he has the necessary framework in place for this:
IANAL, but I think there are three considerations here: 1/ That those contributing give away / license their own rights in the data they submit 2/ That those contributing don't use sources that are copyright-encumbered in some way 3/ That there is no over-riding encumbrance on the data-set, allowing someone to claim rights over it even though it's been collected independently rather than copied. Point 1 is easy to address, you just have any contributors agree to either place their contributions in the public domain, or licence them under a suitable free licence. If this hasn't been done so far, then the current data may not be ok to use. Point 2 may require some user education as to what is and isn't acceptable. But for this particular case, there is the more important issue that the background map is from Google. As far as I'm aware, Google claims rights in any coordinates obtained by clicking on a Google map. This could well be a show-stopper for the existing data, but could be fixed for new submissions by switching to an open base map such as OSM. As for Point 3, I would say that anyone would have a rather hard job claiming any rights over the locations of publicly viewable bright red boxes that someone else has collected individually. But that's not to say they wouldn't try. (This could be a problem for all sorts of data in OSM though, including any Canadian postboxes already present.) The case is significantly weaker than for postcodes though, since we're talking about coordinates of physical objects that anyone could obtain independently, rather than crowd-sourced copying of data that could only have come initially from Canada Post's official list. I don't know what the current coverage of post boxes in Canada is like in OSM. One option that might be worth considering is for him to run a site that allows contributors to directly add a postbox node in OSM, along the lines of http://onosm.org/ but adding the data live through a dedicated account. (You'd need to watch for vandalism though.) And then for the database his site uses for showing the locations to come directly from a regularly updated OSM data export. That way we don't have to worry about importing data, and his site gets the benefit of any boxes already in OSM or added to OSM in the future by other means. Hope that helps, Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk