What really is copying?

I am aware that no copied work must be published in osm, however I am confused to know what counts as copying… let me give some examples…

  1. You ask a local where a feature is (you dont know this but they know where the feature is because they keep seeing it on google maps)

  2. You are navigating to a place your friends told you about, not finding it on osm you look for it in google maps, you go there and do what you wanted to, are you forbidden from mapping that area in osm

  3. 2 but you decided to not go there but remembered where the place was but forgot why you know that

  4. 2 but someone one else took you there using gmaps without your knowledge

  5. Your friened has internalized the geography by examining gmaps, are you forbidden from asking him geographical questions

I am sure you get my point… where do you draw the line

Good question. Here’s are some similar questions that led to robust discussion:

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I think, having been there, in person, in place, you are fine to contribute that from GPS readings perhaps corrected by kosher aerials too.

What I understand from this is that the copyright can only be held for databases of facts, in all my above points only individual facts were in use, so all of them should be fine legally ? And everything but having both maps on screen and comparing features or using APIs to import data should be fine as well ?

I looked up online and found no results for kosher imagery… what are they ?

Kosher imagery: Imagery that we are allowed to trace from in OSM, e.g. Bing aerial imagery.

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There’s the letter of the law, and then there’s the legal reality of what you’re willing to risk without getting sued, and then there’s the social reality of what you’re willing to stake your reputation on. OSM aims to be whiter than white, which sometimes means foregoing a legally plausible approach that might risk spending OSMF donations on a strategically dubious defense in court or allowing competitors to spread FUD about the project.

Many of your hypotheticals seem to rely on plausible deniability. You don’t need to live in fear that part of your brain has been indirectly contaminated by the non-free media consumption habits of friends and total strangers. Applying common knowledge is not copying. Coming along for the ride is not copying, either. However, if you intentionally use your friends to systematically extract information in bulk from a proprietary source, then even if your clean room technique technically hasn’t violated anyone’s copyright, the result may be indistinguishable from copyright infringement, inviting the same legal trouble. Besides, it would raise ethical concerns about plagiarism that will probably upset your fellow mappers.

By the way, is this purely a hypothetical question, or do you have a specific case in mind that you’d like us to consider as a community?

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Well I thought of posting this when one of my friends sent me his address on gmaps, later on i showed him my contributions to osm after which he asked me to map the area around his house… ( i haven’t done it because it seemed dubious ) which led to me wondering… however this was not the only instance that influenced me to make this post