Hi,
(Two disclaimers / disclosures:
- I’m active to some extent on the Hebrew Wikipedia, and this question originated there, while trying to understand limitations and possibilities.
- My background is mostly physics and math, and I’m pretty clueless in politics. I hope that this question doesn’t sound political or anything, because it’s meant as a purely technical question.)
Actually, this question is made of two related parts.
First: there are relations in OSM defining the boundaries of regional councils, such as the Gezer regional council relation. In Wikipedia, these relations are used for map generation, like here. However, I couldn’t find boundary relations for any of the six regional councils im Judea and Samaria (ערבות הירדן, שומרון, מטה בנימין, מגילות ים המלח, גוש עציון, הר חברון. Technically speaking, there are elements such as Shomron regional council and Arvot Hayarden regional council, but they seem to define the boundaries of the individual towns/settlements belonging to that regional council). Is there a reason for not having these relations? Is there some OSM standard / directive / convention discouraging the creation of these boundary relations? Or is it simply that no one got around to create them yet?
In case the last option is the correct explanation, I wanted to ask a follow-up question (if you think that it deserves a separate forum topic, let me know).
According to the basic guide (first bullet), copyrighted material cannot be used to create the maps. I asked around, and was told that according to the Israeli copyright law, section 5 (quoting the law in Hebrew):
זכות יוצרים ביצירה כאמור בסעיף 4 לא תחול על כל אחד מאלה, ואולם על דרך ביטוים תחול זכות היוצרים:
(1) רעיון;
(2) תהליך ושיטת ביצוע;
(3) מושג מתמטי;
(4) עובדה או נתון;
(5) חדשות היום.
And since the coordinates of the boundary polygon of a regional council are “facts/data”, they fall under (4) and are therefore not copyrighted. (Contrarily, things like the map design, colors etc. are “דרך ביטויים” and are this copyrighted). I was told that I can use a map such as the one in the federation of regional authorities website (מרכז השלטון האזורי) to draw a new map of my own, even though the image is copyrighted to Avigdor Orgad and the webpage containing it is copyrighted to the regional authority federation. So I was wondering if I understood the OSM rules correctly, or if the rules talk about something else (e.g., about automatically harvesting the data or something, whereas manually redrawing a map is actually allowed, or something of the like).
Many thanks!