In my opinion, copying from Google Street View is still a legally dubious thing to do. There is no formal licensing agreement with Google that I know of. It is perfectly fine to capture data by taking pictures yourself, but relying on Google Street View cars to take those pictures is legally dubious. Google Street View is often outdated anyway. Copying from Google Maps is clearly not allowed.
I realize that we don't want to alienate users, but I think that OSM still needs to be strict about deleting contributions from legally dubious sources. Many new users simply don't realize that copying from Google is not allowed, and may have made many other contributions from legal sources (which will not be deleted). In other cases, users don't realize that there are sources that OSM is legitimately allowed to copy from - e.g. I have had to explain to users in Canada that copying road names from Google is not OK, but copying from Geobase and Canvec is perfectly acceptable. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
