Pieren wrote: >> Anyone round here ever seen the film 'Groundhog Day'? > If you mean it's a desperate fud which will never end, I understand.
Yes. If we separate the horrid neologism into its three component parts - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt - then I'm entirely with you on that. We are Uncertain as to what exactly copyright law and Google's (IMO deliberately[1]) ambiguous terms allow. We are Doubtful at what point Google would start suing people. We are Fearful that the world's biggest technology company could, with one carefully publicised nastygram, undermine the promise at the heart of OSM - "you can rely that this data is legally safe to use". Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. That's exactly why we don't do it. If you are a world-beating copyright, database rights and contract lawyer with a billion-pound fortune you don't mind pissing away, then maybe you can elevate the debate beyond that. But I doubt it (not least because it's pretty clear there's no such thing as a world-beating database rights lawyer). Come on, Pieren, you are smart enough to know all this. IIRC you were among the first to comment on my long Bauman vs Fussell posting way back when, which was pretty much the same issue. We know the parameters of the debate: all we can do is rattle around inside them, Groundhog Day-style. cheers Richard [1] I actually think Google is being depressingly smart on this. They purposefully don't elucidate what you can and can't do. On the one hand, they want people to build geo apps and create indexable geodata on the Google Maps platform - even though some of this might well infringe their data/imagery suppliers' copyright. On the other, they don't want anyone - like OSM - to leverage their data to build their own platform. So they just say nothing. It's best for their business that way. -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Okay-this-is-just-cool-Lockport-NY-tp6225128p6228293.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
