It would be easier to migrate this files to Commons
This is another topic. But the answer is: yes, unfortunately there is legal precedent that route geometry is granted legal protection in France. Which creates a relational quagmire between OSM and our hiking federation.
Have you talked to the LWG about this?
As far as I know the talks with the hiking federation are (or were) carried out by the national OSM advocacy organization a few years ago. Iām not sure how much LWG was involved, given that one key member of this national organization was more or less involved in the drafting of the law that ultimately should resolve the issue.
Meanwhile we focus on mapping routes that are published by local governments, and we discourage mapping of litigious routes as much as we canā¦ Hopefully having high quality mapping for everything except ātheirā routes should make them react.
Maybe we need another thread for this topic as well?
How are these litigious entities establishing their routes? Is there anything on the ground, or do the routes exist only on paper?
In the U.S., weāve prioritized mapping āpublicā cycling and hiking routes that have markers or blazes on the ground, whether theyāre maintained by a government agency or an enthusiast group. While it can sometimes be difficult to track down a decent source for these routes, weāve been confident that mapping them based on groundtruth would avoid any copyright issue.
Private groups also publish more ephemeral routes as guide books or maps, but weāre more careful about those. Over the years, weāve developed a relationship with groups like the Adventure Cycling Association that give us permission to copy from their route logs, but in general we arenāt very aggressive about getting every privately designated route onto the map. After all, local running clubs publish their favorite routes too, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
Does the situation in France follow a similar distinction between public and private routes? Could this distinction also clarify the requirements around route marker symbols, so that mappers donāt inadvertently put renderer developers in a tricky legal spot?
As I started to explain, things are very much intricate. We are talking about a national non-profit receiving public subsidies, who federates local non-profits receiving public subsidies, and whose role has evolved over time from designing and maintaining routes to something that is more akin to managing a brand and a national network. To ensure its monopoly it claims intellectual property over the design of routes that have sometimes been designed by local governments (with or without subcontracting to the local non-profits), sometimes have been co-produced, etc.
The other legal means it uses to protect its monopoly is a couple of trademarked symbols (white and red, yellow and red) that are visible on the ground and instantly recognized by a huge portion of the population. And to make things more tricky, these signs have been adopted long ago in a few other countries (Spain, Belgium, Netherlands)
(now we are deep into off-topic territory; maybe a moderator could move this to another thread?)