I have been hiking in the Andes and made a note about an unmapped lake I saw at some distance from me (on a side ridge where I did not go in person). Now at my computer, I had trouble locating it precisely as it is interminent and was dry at the time when both Bing and Esri took their pictures. I thought I could spot the dry lakebed but was not sure. On Google Earth, one has shots of the same place from multiple times and at one of those the lake was clearly visible full of water and it turns out it was the place I thought it was. Is it ok for me to map the lake then?
I have been there, so I have local knowledge, I can now very clearly see it on Bing, which can legaly be used, but I was not sure about it until I verified it on Google Earth (which cannot be used).
Well. I am more than happy to break Google terms as I am solely responsible for a breach (I am not even sure these terms apply to an EU citizen, and even if they did, what can they do to me?).
I am asking about copyright as I care about legal cleanlines of OSM. And I am not sure if I would be breaking Google’s copyright by doing what I described (as I already knoe from personal knowledge that a lake is there).
That would confirm my intuition that it is most likely legal (see that alledged comment from a Google lawyer in the accepted answer), but it is discouraged due to precautionary principle.
(I would just like to remind that there is a big difference between copying data and between tracing and between just refreshing something you know from somewhere - also the Google FAQ on the wiki says there are rare exceptions and one should ask about them and I think this falls under it).
Too bad you didn’t note the lat/lon or take a geo-referenced photo at the time you saw the lake. Then you could have found the apparently seasonal lake on Bing or ERSI imagery without resorting to Google.
But you say that with Google refreshing your memory you have found the location on the Bing imagery. Assuming you can see the outline of the lake on Bing, then I think you can map it. You are not using Google imagery to do the actual mapping, you are using Bing and the knowledge you gained when you were in the area in person.
I view this as the same type of thing where you might use Google for navigation to a shop or other destination. Once there you find there are things that could be added or corrected in OSM. So you add or correct them using your local survey and possibly OSM compliant imagery. Just because you used Google to discover or navigate to the area does not mean you cannot independently map it once you are there based on what you see.
Since I am getting dislikes on my previous post, I would like to clarify. I explicitly said that I care about OSM. That is why I am asking the question in the first place. But Google could sue OSM if it had a case of copyright infringements (which it does not or would not). They cannot sue OSM (though IANAL) for me having breached the licence of Google Earth – they can maybe sue me for that, but since they would probably need to do that under the law of my country, they would have a hard case of proving material damage so the only thing that would happen would be a revocation of my license to use Google Earth. That is why I said I personally do not necessarily care about Google licence. I do care about it only as far as any harm to OSM could occur. And I might also be wrong about this understanding – my question was mainly about copyright, I did not clarify it I guess.
There are also other reasons for the whiter than white approach:
The sales representatives of large companies that offer their own geodata might go around asking data consumers: Do you really want to use this OSM geodata, which is full of legal risks? We, on the other hand, have geodata that has been checked and certified by our excellent legal department.
OpenStreetMap takes and has always taken a whiter-than-white view of
copyright. We aim to provide a dataset that anyone can use without fear of
legal repercussions. It is not OSM’s role to explore interesting grey areas
in copyright, nor to push things to the extent that a court case is
necessary.
