Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t aware that this was a formal term for that practice specifically.
Ah nice analogy, and more relevant to our project too.
not sure is it formal term, but that is how it was used by Wikimedia Commons community.
I found now
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The limits are that there are not even claimed intellectual property rights involved in the example and it illustrates exactly nothing of relevance to this thread.
The whole point of (conventional) copyright is that it is a near universal, state guaranteed, set of exclusive rights that does not rely on contracts between the parties to take effect. There are some corner cases wrt terms, and the US “fair use” terms tend to be substantially more relaxed than in other countries, but as said, corner cases.
I find the statement from the LWG a bit unfortunate as it could be taken as saying that material on a website is not protected at all, but naturally that is not the case, images, text, audio, visual etc. material that is eligible for copyright protection naturally doesn’t lose that protection just because the rights owner decided to use them on a website, or licence such use. So if you scrape images from websites and try to reuse them in a form that isn’t an exception in copyright protection you are asking for trouble.
What the LWG is referring to is the extraction of information, or if you so will “data”, from websites and that has already been discussed at length in this thread.
OK, fair enough. I’ve redacted it from my earlier post.
Doesn’t look this question was ever appropriately answered… If a citizen of a country where there are no database rights, were to want to add data to OSM, from a database consisting of non-copyrightable data, from an organization which only operates in that country( lets say the government of that country )… is it allowed?
EDITS: grammar and punctuation… hope it is more readable now.
The largest problem is that the OSM community is not one entity. Even with the official organization being registered as a charitable organization in the UK, each chapter is bound by the laws of the respective countries.
Then there is the official database that carries data with multiple copyrights that have been traditionally used with software. Licenses that have never been truly tested in most jurisdictions.
That doesn’t even include the different members with pseudo official websites and tools. Each maintained by thier own subgroups.
At the end of the day, the best we can do is show that we are working in good faith. Doing our best to follow the spirit of the respective laws in whatever jurisdictions where the map might efitted or accessed. I doubt any multinational corporation’s legal department wouldn’t want to deal with our situation. That is assuming they could even figure it all out if they wanted to. We likely get a pass for of these mostly due to being a charity that provides so much value to those in so many jurisdictions.
For that reason alone most of the government agencies and corporations we partners with have an interest in preventing any real litigation from moving forward. They lose a lot when inoffensive volunteers get servered with legal paperwork. In a way, OSM has become the UN of mapping by holding ourselves to a higher standard.
It was an essentially rhetorical question, as nobody had claimed that regional/national regulations outside of conventional copyright have universal application.
The problem (forgetting about ethical issues) lies in that OSM data is used universally. Any data that for whatever reason can’t be used in area A but can be legally obtained in area B will end up being distributed in area A.
The whole basis of this thread is people in country B complaining that they need to comply / show that they comply with the rules in area A for data obtained in area A if they want to include it in OSM.
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Just for correctness sake: the OSMF is not registered as a charitable organisation in the UK.
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My question is unfortunately not rhetorical, even if the original one probably was.
The problem with this is that the locals of a jurisdiction are best placed to assess that and a central DWG assessing this is just flawed design.
This still doesn’t answer the question though. Is that a no?
I understand that this thread was about a particular dataset, I wouldn’t mind starting a new thread if you think this is the wrong place to ask the question.
As I pointed out further above it is a “it depends”.
The dataset is produced in B but contains data obtained in A and B (and more). The original question was “can I use the dataset in OSM”, and the answer has always been “sure, if any data obtained from A can be legally included in OSM for use in A, because A is important for OSM” (obviously everything paraphrased).
There just isn’t a blanket statement by the creator of the database that the above holds, this doesn’t make the data unusable for a mapper that verifies themself that the store location information is actually extracted from and published on the companies website, because as has been established that should work legally for most places. Contrary for example as to if it had been generated by a query on Here’s website.
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Thanks for the clarification.
This is also my understanding: that mapping info from text on website operated by shop chain is as fine as mapping info from text on door operated by shop chain.
At imports mailing list I submitted for review edit plan that would add some fuel stations, partially using data from Orlen website (via ATP dataset).
This is a good moment to post there (or tell me to make thread also here, I guess) that this plan is bad for one reason or another.
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