I am not quite sure about this topic, I searched through the OSM wiki and this forum and found nothing. Sorry if I missed a good site where the questions I have are answered.
For example I want to add the opening hours of a certain local store to OSM. The opening hours can be searched for on this webpage in my case: https://www.nahkauf.de/maerkte (German supermarket chain). Am I allowed to do that? In general, do I violate copyrights if I take the opening hours of a public website and add them to OSM without asking? Is this kind of data not protected at all? Or is it common for our community to ignore, for example, opening hours published on official websites and better try to look for yourself in person?
For me, German laws would apply but I am asking in English because I am interested in differences or problems in other countries.
Thanks for answering.
IMHO it is OK when you take the opening hours from the website of the shop. It is not OK to copy them from a website that collects opening hours, such as Google or openinghours-shops.com. I believe the main problem is that you are not allowed to copy data from a database that required substantial effort to create/collect.
Generally speaking, facts are not protected by copyright. Based on that, looking at the website of a single shop to find out the opening hours would not be problematic.
However, databases of facts can enjoy legal protection in some jurisdictions, especially in the EU. And info for the hundreds of supermarkets of a chain is probably substantial enough to count as a database as well. So in my (non-expert) opinion, it’s not an unambiguously legal source, and it’s better not to copy from it without explicit permission.