OpenStreetMap
I stumbled on this map today, from a guy called The Amirr who has made tons of maps. He claims they are his work , but then says he sourced them from an atlas.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Highways_of_Albania.svg
What is the deal on all the map material in wikipedia, why do they have so many maps and points that we cannot use?
Why are the licensing rules so lax there and so stringent here?
mike
Discussion
Comment from Gnonthgol on 31 March 2010 at 19:29
Unlike OSM wikipedia uses the "Don't care about where it comes from" approach to data gathering. There are no "source" tag on wikipedia as there is in OSM. Images are usually user work or derived from a number of sources that a user has made his own work.
I think some license laws permits uses of a small part of data in derived works as long as it is not a vital part of the derived work. This does not apply to map data as every part is a vital part.
Comment from h4ck3rm1k3 on 31 March 2010 at 19:44
Well, these are maps. Wikipedia is full of maps that we cannot use. Also wikipedia have systematically collected millions of datapoints from google maps.
The google map is still the preferred source for geohack.
How can that work? Only because google tolerates it or there is some legal basis to it?
Comment from h4ck3rm1k3 on 31 March 2010 at 20:09
see my new thread on wikipedia foundation list
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-March/057454.html
Comment from imroy on 1 April 2010 at 02:22
The simple answer is that Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation are victims of their own success.
The fact is that WP/WM do have rules about copyrights, including fair use. But there are so many people adding images and photos that some things slip through. They should be spotted eventually and replaced or removed. Hopefully.
As to the coordinates on many articles, Google "tolerates" their use probably because they can in turn harvest them and use them in Google Earth.
Comment from seav on 3 April 2010 at 01:37
Well, Wikimedia being based in the US takes the US position on copyright that facts are uncopyrightable. So you can take encyclopedic facts and rewrite them in your own words just as you can copy map facts, but not the map styles and other representation, and present them in your own style.
OSM, being a UK-initiated project, also considers the EU-database rights and UK's sweat-of-the-brow view on copyright so OSM has to be stricter with respect to facts taken from a database.
Comment from h4ck3rm1k3 on 4 April 2010 at 06:16
My suggestion is that we introduce a new tag into wikipedia and a new marker if the data is usable under UK or US copyright law. Then we would know what information is usable at all. Right now the maps and points in WP are not really sourced at all.
If you look at the difference between these two pages, you might think that WP is encouraging people to use google maps :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/WMSPlugin#Licensing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinates_%28obtaining%29#On_the_web