here in France we need to take into account the local jurisprudence that says that route geometry is protected by copyright law.
btw, is this only relevant for people mapping while they are in France, or is it also a problem when the mapper is in Germany (for example)?
I am not a lawyer, and the subtleties of treaties and international laws escape me. But I suspect that the answer is “yes, you can infringe from abroad”, especially within the European Union.
There probably also are subtleties about who is infringing. Is it the contributor? The OSMF? The person who distributes a map? The map renderer? all of them?
In all honesty, reality is far from theory here: the OSM wiki has signs everywhere asking contributors to avoid mapping routes managed by FFRP (our national hiking federation) because they oppose it and threaten legal action, but as soon as a route is removed from OSM it is added again by someone else. That is another field where consensus between mappers and application developers would be desirable, for instance through a tag that tells what is the legal status of a route, or who the ‘copyright’ holder is, or what are the limitations to reuse of that piece of data. Another option would be a complex system that knows the geometry of ‘forbidden routes’ and removes them as soon as they appear, but this seems more elusive.
That’s it. You have to create a route as an OSM relation.
The name is the name of the route, not the name of the individual segments (OSM ways).
Anyone in the OSM community can make the decision to create a relation for each route (and restore the name of each path).
As an experienced OSM user for hiking trail mapping, I say go for it! 
Hi,
Regarding the legal terms behind adding data on OSM, I’m not so sure to fully understand.OSM is open source, and in my opinion it’s up to the User (and not to the contributor) to engage their own responsibility when using those data.
How many times did I walk/drive to a POI (restaurant, bar, …) that actually did not exist anymore. I’m not sure I was going to sue OSM for this. I use OSM because I believe in a community that helps each others. If someone makes a mistake and routes a way into a wrong direction, it’s still up to the User, once on this way, to realize something is wrong (you might be in a private property) and just reverse and hopefully update the database to avoid other Users to be in the same situation.
In NZ, on north island, the ways are incredibly well tagged and the only missing part is to link them into a relation. Some of them already exist, some don’t. I also noticed that some contributors were using the tag “close” when these ways are officially closed (maintenance, Kauri dieback,…) so I believe those contributors are either from the DoC, or passionate hiker like me that would take on their personal time to have a database used by anyone.
So I’d be up to create those relations, and I could ask for “review” and see what the NZ admin think about it.
Yes, this probably should not prevent you from mapping routes. What made me mention it is that 1) in the European Union there is a regulation on map providers (but it seems more focused on roads), and 2) here in France we often hear about (their) legal responsibility when we talk with route operators or tourism offices. If you can read French, there is a whole book about the legalities of hiking that is published here by our hiking federation: http://creps971.free.fr/am/cours/reglementation/ffrp_droitChemins.pdf
Overall, my main goal about this issue was to raise the point of data updates: ensuring that what we create will be updated may be a reasonable responsibility that we can self-impose.