I recently bought a very cheap dash cam and have recorded about 30 mins of footage of my local city. Sitting watching the footage, I have dozens of mappable stuff e.g. shops/businesses which have changed from the current map or even not mapped at all, etc. There was even an Indian restaurant which closed about ten years ago, still tagged as open. Anyway, to get to the point, is it acceptable to use DuckDuckGo, Facebook, to look up further information?
What about a local newspaper website? They often have articles like “7 Best Gyms in Your Area” or a news item about a new beauty salon opening. Is it considered Fair Use to then go and map them?
5 Likes
Not really, OSM’s goal is to have data as clean as possible, an approach known as “White than white”:
For OSM to be whiter than white w.r.t. copyright, it should not exploit any grey areas [which includes fair use] or loopholes.
Furthermore, fair use also varies from country to country, some of which don’t even have fair use, which, for an international project, disqualifies the use of fair use anyway.
2 Likes
For more perspectives, see these topics, which focused more narrowly on facts from primary sources:
3 Likes
I don’t like where the title of this thread is going.
Fair use is part of (US) copyright law and is an exception to copyright protection that you in general would have to assert and defend in court. We don’t want to go there.
Other jurisdictions tend to not have anything that goes as far as fair use in the states, but there are things like transformational and educational use which in some cases are similar.
But none of the above applies to material/facts/etc that is not protected, and if we have any discussion, it should be along such lines and -not- fair use.
6 Likes
First of all – welcome to OSM, and thank you for getting out there and observing (and recording) more about your local area! That’s exactly what we want people to do.
As I understand it, the fact that a business is open or not, and what their hours are, are facts, and fine to add to OSM as long as you know they are true, as long as you found them out by your own observations.
As for using existing lists of businesses to plan your own surveys, I think that is fine, too – as long as you don’t add them until you have actually seen them yourself. It can get more questionable if you rely on the existing list, and haven’t checked that it is correct yourself, first.
2 Likes
Further rulings on taking material facts from first party websites (including chains).
Taking information from secondary websites / databases (Google, Facebook etc.) is a definite no-no.
2 Likes
The problem with this as a hard and fast rule is that many small businesses do not have their own website, and instead maintain only a Facebook page, Google listing, or similar to provide information to public.
6 Likes
Personally (!) I think it is Ok to take the information from the company’s own Facebook page as it is one of their websites (just hosted of Facebook), but to take the information from another Facebook page where it maybe was discussed seems wrong to me.
5 Likes
One of the challenges is that any business listing on Facebook, Yelp, or Google can be a mix of owner-provided information and supplemental information from third-party databases. It isn’t always easy to discern the provenance of the information.
For example, on Facebook, you might not want to take the “Website” field at face value, since it’s sometimes completely wrong, conflated with some other business by the same name. But if the owner manually posts a link to their website or a flier that mentions the website URL, then at least that’s a clearly a primary source, and you can always access the site to verify it, just as personally visiting a shop means that you yourself are the source. On Yelp, a restauranteur’s freeform description of their restaurant might characterize the cuisine; I’m not sure the more standardized cuisine tags on the listing are necessarily from the same source.
Facebook has apparently fed much of their business listing data into Overture, which could be a less encumbered route to obtain this information. The same caveats about accuracy still apply, however.
5 Likes
Yes, this seems fine to me. If the owner has posted “Here are updated opening hours”, it seems perfectly fine to use this. I’ve just avoided taking “facts” from Facebook (as opposed to website), partly because giving “Facebook” as source might be a red flag to other contributors.
Google is a different matter entirely since accumulating data is their business model (as opposed to hosting owner-provided content). Recently I’ve seen that they are actively checking opening hours information they hold (e.g. .confirmed X weeks ago).
1 Like
But OP did not ask about copying data from DuckDuckGo, etc.
He asked about looking things up.
And if OP has seen a restaurant, and uses DuckDuckGo to search for it, and finds the website of that restaurant, and then used some information from that website, I cannot see a problem with it.
If I read in my local newspaper that a restaurant have gone out of business, or has burned, or that a new place has opened, then I have that information, and that cannot stop me from checking out those places and editing OSM accordingly.
If I read a good review of a new restaurant I might eat there and then add it to OSM.
“Taking information” is a very vague term. It can mean both “learning facts” and “copying”.
5 Likes
As an aside, another question you may want to ask is if it is worth adding additional information if you live in an area that is seldom updated.
I take a middle ground approach and add a link to the website or Facebook page (after verifying it is the correct one) to allow consumers to easily find them. That way hours and other information the business wants to put out there is easily accessible and the burden to keep it up to date doesn’t fall on OSM mappers. There is also no concern as to copyright as you are not copying any information.
While having that additional information is nice, having outdated information is harmful for usability and adoption of OSM based consumers.
I think Overture will pave the way to bridge this information gap in the future, but will take time and proper validation linking the datasets (hopefully a tag like Wikidata, but for Overture).
1 Like
I shouldn’t have used the term “fair use” then if it implies fair use of copyrighted material. All I want to know is if it is okay to look up a business on a search engine, their own website or the likes of Facebook so I can add relevant factual information as tags.
4 Likes
Having reviewed many small museums across the the US and UK, some of the smaller ones only use facebook, but post regularly, others post a couple of times a year and all you can do is verify that it exists, not when it is open etc.
More often the facebook pages are a place to corroborate other sources (like tourism orgs for a city, or county that list the POI but the page isn’t actively managed by the POI itself).
So it really depends on the type of business or POI you are looking at.
Blanket statements about whether an entire site can be used for any type of business, POI, etc, in my opinion, prevent a lot of potentially useful and correct information from being added to OSM. The more someone reviews POI the easier it is to see patterns and understand what may be incorrect, suspicious or unverifiable.
The answer should always be to proceed with caution and care, not, “don’t do that, ever”. In the end the information listed is publicly available, Facebook’s terms state that content posted by a user, is owned by that user.
How content is used for various services is IP.
1 Like