2009/9/9 Ian Dees <[email protected]>: > Back in March, Ed Parsons pointed out [0] that since StreetView images are > Google-owned, if someone asked nicely-enough we could get them to give us a > license to explicitly map based on the streetview images (similar to the > explicit license we have with Yahoo).
I'm not sure if anybody took this further with Ed or with Google back around the time of that tweet, but I sent him a quick email earlier to see what the status was here, and what we would be allowed to use Street View images for, if anything. His response was basically that it's fine to check our existing facts using the imagery from Street View, but it's not allowed - due to their license - to do any mass data extraction from the images that would then be republished. >From Ed: === This remains a grey area of ip law, if it is the case of checking from the photography itself facts such as the name of a building, that would be ok.. there are some key points in the Terms of Service which are useful.. "..you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude co-ordinates." This is really saying you are not allowed to do mass tracing of features that are then made available to third parties. === I came across a situation the other day where I was adding the address details of a pub[1] to the map and noticed that the street name (Edis St, from their website) didn't match up with the name of the street in OSM[2] (Edith St). >From what Ed's suggested, Street View could probably have been used to confirm the local name[3] (ignore the armed police [4] ;) - to see whether the pub had a typo on their site, or we had a typo in our database - without having to go out and re-survey. [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/265649578 [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/8400167 [3] http://tr.im/yfAo [4] http://tr.im/yfAU Cheers, Dan ps - I'm not a lawyer :) -- Dan Karran [email protected] www.dankarran.com _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
