Anthony wrote: > Is it okay to use Google Street View to confirm turning restrictions, > street names, etc? This seems like an obvious "yes" to me, but then, > I would have said the same thing about tracing from a satellite photo, > so I'm not going to try to guess international copyright law. The simple answer is that Street View is still protected by copyright, and that by using it you agree to Google's terms and conditions, so unless you have specific permission to derive data from it, it's safest to assume you can't. We're generally paranoid about copyright infringement because we don't want to jeopardise the entire project for the sake of a relatively small gain (Street View tends to cover urban areas, which are easier to survey in person anyway).
You also need to consider that Street View still uses Google Maps as part of its interface (and possibly for the overlaid navigation data), so it's affected by the licence on that data. However, Google does own the Street View pictures themselves in their entirety. If they, with the location and bearing of each one was made available to OSM under terms compatible with CC-BY-SA (or ODBL), then we could use them. We would need a way of accessing the images that made no reference to any other geodata (so the standard web interface would be out). It's something we'd need to negotiate, but we can't do it at present, unfortunately. J. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
