There is an abundance of data, some are free, some are licensed and then there are some which have strange and peculiar license requirements, for example only being able to use it if you don’t make it look like the original data but acknowledge the source.
It may seem harmless to share someone else’s work, but to those of us who invest time and make sacrifices to provide quality content, it may be hurtful and damaging when information and maps are taken out of context, especially when the content is used for profit.
If you think that copyright infringement doesn’t happen very much, it is sobering to read that Google has delisted almost 6 BILLION URLs (see here), lets not forget that being delisted means that the site or page has been reported, and verified as infringing the copyright of another page and recorded, it will not include the millions of pages that never get captured.
So, a few years ago I had a chat with a chap called Curtis Newbold (from The VCG) about the laws and ethics of using information grabbed from the internet and he let me adopt a flowchart that he created so that I could reference maps and map data.
Almost 10 years later, I wanted to revisit the flowchart to see where what may have changed and update it. Here is the new update.
