On 15/11/2011 15:54, Andrew Laughton wrote:
This is different to what I thought is was.
Could someone please remind me why Nearmap and Google maps do not want
us to trace their aerial views ?
Google just don't allow it in their basic terms of service. We have
asked them to allow us and the informal answer was that the imagery
comes from different suppliers under different agreements, so it would
be just too difficult. We also provide a map from our own website as
well as map data so are a potential competitor ... but that is me
speculating.
Nearmap have a business model that requires them to claim copyright from
their commercial customers of not only the imagery but anything that is
traced from it. Therefore they were very tightly constrained to make
sure they did nothing that undermined their commercial business. Both
they, and us, tried very hard but in the end I guess their lawyers were
unable to sign off on it from a commercial risk point of view.
Bing make no claim on anything traced as long as it is put in the OSM
database. Me speculating again; this is a case where having a
share-alike license is a good thing, Microsoft, like IBM and Novell with
Linux, can make something available safe in the knowledge that it cannot
be snaffled and improved by a competitor during at least a business
cycle, help their customers with an OSM layer, and eventually spend less
money on other commercial map providers. It will be great if they can
extend their higher-resolution coverage of Australian non-city areas,
something to work on.
Also if I agree to the new license, is there an easy way to delete all
my Yahoo aerial tracing, or is this now allowed ?
I think I had a source tag on most, if not all of it, but at the
moment I am locked out from viewing it.
Yahoo imagery is or or shortly will be longer available as they are
winding up their own map unit, the imagery delivery has been on
auto-pilot for some time. The permission to use it for past tracing
remains unchanged and they make no copyright claim over the tracings
made, so I hope that solves the question? If not or you or anyone else
has other difficult data, let me know and we will try to help. We have
one instance where a contributor can accept for data in one area of the
world but not another area, and another instance where a contributor
feels they cannot accept for contributions made during a certain time
interval.
Mike
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