On 04/11/2012 16:48, Andrew MacKinnon wrote:
In my opinion, copying from Google Street View is still a legally
dubious thing to do. There is no formal licensing agreement with
Google that I know of. It is perfectly fine to capture data by taking
pictures yourself, but relying on Google Street View cars to take
those pictures is legally dubious. Google Street View is often
outdated anyway. Copying from Google Maps is clearly not allowed.
I realize that we don't want to alienate users, but I think that OSM
still needs to be strict about deleting contributions from legally
dubious sources. Many new users simply don't realize that copying from
Google is not allowed, and may have made many other contributions from
legal sources (which will not be deleted). In other cases, users don't
realize that there are sources that OSM is legitimately allowed to
copy from - e.g. I have had to explain to users in Canada that copying
road names from Google is not OK, but copying from Geobase and Canvec
is perfectly acceptable.
This is an interesting discussion about where to draw the line. To use
one example: I could walk to the end of my street right now and look at
the street sign; I could then do the same for all neighbouring roads in
my locality. However, I could go to Google Street View and do the same
thing.
For simple pieces of factual data like that, obviously in the public
domain before Google began to compile their own imagery, my gut feeling
is that this is arguably OK to do in a pinch. Whilst not preferred, and
'trumpable' by another user submitting empirical observations, it's not
a clear infringement of Google's cache of data as they never had
exclusive access to the information prior to their own compilation efforts.
You can obtain lists of street names from Royal Mail - heck, you can
scrape them from PD mapping sources. The road network hasn't changed
that dramatically in 100 years, save for trunk roads and infill in
increasingly urban areas (IMO).
However, 1:1 copying of complete topographical or road network
information is far past the mark and also both a clear infringement of
copyrighted materials and the licence under which access to said data is
granted by the owner(s).
If you copied Street View information wholesale, it's also a similarly
clear infringement of licensed, copyrighted materials. Just the street
names, however, isn't (on its own) a capital offence nor an obvious
infringement of copyright. That all said, it shouldn't be encouraged as
the sole source of information when compiling OSM maps - all it then
does is further encourage laziness.
What's absolutely clear as unallowable behaviour is for contributors to
only rely upon road names from trad line-drawn maps, simply copying
verbatim. Trap roads abound...
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