On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 20:33 +, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:
On 21 January 2014 18:18, Adam Williamson ad...@happyassassin.net wrote:
Hi, folks! I'm a new OSM contributor in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'm doing
some manual, on-the-ground, local knowledge mapping, but I'm also
looking for importable sources of important data types we're currently
missing locally.
There is a guy running a project at http://wherepost.ca/ to produce a
crowdsourced database of post box locations in Canada. There's a
feedback page at http://wherepost.ca/about/ where I've been interacting
with him. I believe his intent is for this information to be free, but I
don't think he has the necessary framework in place for this:
IANAL, but I think there are three considerations here:
1/ That those contributing give away / license their own rights in the
data they submit
2/ That those contributing don't use sources that are
copyright-encumbered in some way
3/ That there is no over-riding encumbrance on the data-set, allowing
someone to claim rights over it even though it's been collected
independently rather than copied.
Point 1 is easy to address, you just have any contributors agree to
either place their contributions in the public domain, or licence them
under a suitable free licence. If this hasn't been done so far, then
the current data may not be ok to use. Point 2 may require some user
education as to what is and isn't acceptable. But for this particular
case, there is the more important issue that the background map is
from Google. As far as I'm aware, Google claims rights in any
coordinates obtained by clicking on a Google map. This could well be a
show-stopper for the existing data, but could be fixed for new
submissions by switching to an open base map such as OSM.
Some of the existing submissions have been produced not by clicking the
Google map, but by people submitting geotagged photos via Instagram. The
site author has hacked up some kind of bot to pull in photos with the
hashtag #wherepost from Instagram, and add them to the map. These are
easily identifiable from the source data (and have the rather nice
benefit that they provide pretty solid evidence there really *is* a
postbox there, and also providing us with contact information for the
submitter). Might those be safe to use, if we contact the submitter and
obtain clearance, or would Instagram be able to claim any ownership?
Doing it that way is about as hard as just going out and looking for a
postbox, I guess, but it'd be something I could knock off in little
chunks and allow me to collect data from other cities. Now I look
there's only ~55 of these, so it's not a lot of data, but at least that
means it's not a lot of work. :P
As for Point 3, I would say that anyone would have a rather hard job
claiming any rights over the locations of publicly viewable bright red
boxes that someone else has collected individually. But that's not to
say they wouldn't try. (This could be a problem for all sorts of data
in OSM though, including any Canadian postboxes already present.) The
case is significantly weaker than for postcodes though, since we're
talking about coordinates of physical objects that anyone could obtain
independently, rather than crowd-sourced copying of data that could
only have come initially from Canada Post's official list.
I don't know what the current coverage of post boxes in Canada is like
in OSM. One option that might be worth considering is for him to run a
site that allows contributors to directly add a postbox node in OSM,
along the lines of http://onosm.org/ but adding the data live through
a dedicated account. (You'd need to watch for vandalism though.) And
then for the database his site uses for showing the locations to come
directly from a regularly updated OSM data export. That way we don't
have to worry about importing data, and his site gets the benefit of
any boxes already in OSM or added to OSM in the future by other means.
Given that the existing data is probably not safe to use - I agree on
that, BTW, so thanks for the confirmation! - it sounds like your last
suggestion might be a good way to go, since we'd mostly have to start
over from scratch anyway. I'll run that by him and see what he thinks.
Thanks for the analysis!
(I'll also run up a turbopass query to check how much postbox data there
is in OSM in Canada ATM).
--
adamw
___
legal-talk mailing list
legal-talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
