Dear all, We have found the biggest violation in Italy of the OpenStreetMap license, ever. The author of this violation is the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian revenue service and taxation authority.
We have created a website (in Italian) to show and explain in detail what they are doing: http://agenziauscite.openstreetmap.it/ OSM’s license, the ODBL[1], provides that in every public use of OSM data the use of OSM as source has to attributed. This is missing on the web site of the Agenzia delle Entrate, and we do not appreciate that the authority whose job is enforcing fiscal legality violates so blatantly the rights of others, trampling the very few rules bound to the diffusion of OpenStreetMap: giving credit to the original authors. Since 2007 the Italian OSM community is liberating data from the Public Administration, and since then we dream about liberating the Cadastral data, the data about all the building in Italy, that would bring a huge wealth to OSM and Italy if they were released with an open license. We would have never expected to see OpenStreetMap, a project made by the people and started 10 years ago, being the foundation of the system used by the Agenzia delle Entrate to build the website of the Italian Observatory of the Estate Market (Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare)[0] from the very institution which is administering the Italian Cadastre. The agency has copied only some data (buildings and landuse [parks, rivers, lakes, etc.]) and they superimposed the road graph taken from another source, probably proprietary data. In fact, the roads are different from OSM’s ones - in some cases they go right through the middle of buildings - and they have all of the street names, that in OSM are, in many cases, missing. Our goal is to have them admit their wrongdoing and we would like to start a conversation with them about the release of THEIR data. On the website you can compare the OpenStreetMap rendering and the one produced by the Agency; we encourage you to share this news on social networks using the map when you see a similarity in the two maps. Everybody should be able to verify this violation himself and send a personal tweet about it. One funny thing is that the map we have realized is even better than the original, since it allows to link a specific place, it is responsive and it has a better search function with name autocompletion. Isn’t this a great proof that OpenStreetMap works? The Cadastre, the keeper of the data about Italian building, is using a database built by the people to visualize online their territory. The community is creating applications that work better, the wiki approach is successful. For the last three months we have tried to contact formally the Agency (we have sent registered e-mail whose sending date is legally recognized). We have received no answer. Now, it’s time for us to stop asking and start demanding. The following people were involved in this action: Andrea Borruso, Cristian Consonni, Simone Cortesi, Maurizio Napolitano, Stefano Sabatini. We have dedicated this website to Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). Cristian [0] http://wwwt.agenziaentrate.gov.it/geopoi_omi/index.php [1] http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk