If we ask a company for permission to copy certain information from their website/brochures etc. and they grant it to us, can we start making a list of companies that allow (and have refused, or have special terms imposed) on the wiki to help with this? It would hopefully speed up the progress of adding companies branches, and keeping info up to date by armchair mapping.
at least in German language we already have a list for that purpose in the OSM wiki,
see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Permissions
The Englich equivalent seems to be without useful content, so feel free to add some information about success or failure there.
Maybe you can use the German list as a kind of template …
In the UK, there is a strong anti-importing lobby and this might be considered importing. There is also a strong lobby against using information that is not verifiable on the ground.
The two big problems here are:
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ensuring that the company understands what rights it is granting;
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ensuring that the company understands what rights it is actually able to grant (it may have obtained the data from sources that can’t be used).
The company really needs to agree to the OODBL, and the best way of documenting that is for them to actually set up their own OSM account, even if they sub-contract the data entry to you.