I've given this some more thought and have a safer idea. Contact hand edited, paid for business directories and ask for permission to search their sites for post codes. Then stick all these into a custom google search engine and give osm users some web interface to it using googles ajax api (rather than search bots which are against google's terms). Finally, get osm to implement some user level tag that says 'my edits are public domain' and import only the ways made by these contributors. Rather long winded, but as far as i can see legal and certainly achievable given enough time
On 1/22/09, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
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.
-- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)