On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:11:03AM -0800, bitplane wrote:
OpenStreetMap has tons of road names, those road names exist within some town, the town exists within a county. If we search the web for "road name, town name, county, " and then read and validate the next few characters from the search result we can find every postcode that has a business on it, without infringing on Royal Mail's database rights.
By using the mean location of the waypoints along the road, we have an approximate GPS location.
Does this sound feasible, and legal?
Nope, we can't do this - it is infringing on RM's rights in just the same way as if we'd copied the data directly from the PAF, and we don't want to run the risk of polluting our database with data gained in this way. This is why we're using out of copyright maps as a basis for our collection.
You're obfuscating the search method, but ultimately you're still programmatically extracting data from the PAF.
Cheers, Dominic.