Hello, Recently the user FK270673 has made several edits around Sydney. (e.g. changesets 9800812, 9803159, 9804035)
It appears they have been deleting things already mapped, and re-adding them as * new objects (with new ids, deleting the old objects), * traced from bing, * with the tags from the deleted objects copied to the new object traced from bing One example from the first changeset listed is http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/4989759/history http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/136684127 I feel there are problems with this, but the third one is the critical one for me. I understand that many in OSM would like to remove all data from users who declined the CTs and replace it with their own work under which they agree to the CTs, and although this makes it harder for others like FOSM to use OSM data, I find it acceptable and I don't have a problem with this as anyone who disagrees with this practice can map at fosm. But the third part makes these kinds of edits bad in by opinion. This won't make this area of the map "CT approved", as by copying the existing tags onto the new ways without permission you are making a work derived from a CC-BY-SA work, hence it must be licensed CC-BY-SA. The resulting work cannot be included in a CC0 like or attribution only type license as it would be violating license under which the original work was provided (CC-BY-SA). So all you have achieved by doing this is loosing the original history of the object for no good reason, and possibly reduced the spatial quality of the data (I'm assuming Bing is worse, and less recent than NearMap). I asked the user in question about this, and it seems they take the view that we can't copyright this information, so they feel they are free to copy and release it under whatever license they wish. If this was really true then you can consider the original data (including the shape and location information) copyright free, so you may as well leave it as is; and if this was the case, OSM wouldn't need a rule of "don't copy from other maps", and could copy from other proprietary data sources. I would also take the opportunity to point out to any remaining local mappers of OSM that if these types of edit (i.e. deleting existing data and replacing it with worse quality data ) continue, then it will make it harder for others to pluck out any of your useful edits for use in other mapping projects like fosm. It is fine either way, but it would be unpleasant to see good data being lost because it is to hard to move across to fosm. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
