Last time I checked, wikimapia was a 2-D vector drawing drawn collaboratively on top of a map layer. And in wikimapia you can choose to use a map layer other than Google. OpenStreetMap is there in the options. Even on selecting that, the "Google" icon stays in the bottom left  next to the scale, but that doesn'y mean anything - clicking on it simply takes one to the same location on google maps.

I don't understand the interpretation that longitude-latitude co-ordinates of the placemarks cannot be stored / used with the places. These do not belong to Google. They do not belong to any private entity. Longitudes and latitudes have been used as a universal commons for centuries now, and even Google uses them, without paying any royalty to anybody, to position the right tile at the right place. They are used by all GPS enabled devices as well. The aeronautical industries, shipping industries, as well as all militaries used them as essentials without paying any royalty. On wikimapia, i guess they form the x,y co-ordinates using which 2-D drawings are drawn.

So Duh, of course the lat-long co-ordinates of the vectors drawn will stay with the vector drawings. It's common sense. So the CC-BY-SA license then has merit. And if there's any hurdle that blocks this from happening, then, duh again, the hurdle needs to be fought and removed. Latitude and longitude are universal commons - they are as much anyone's private property as planet Earth is.


Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
http://www.nikhilsheth.tk
http://www.facebook.com/nikjs




On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 2:59 AM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh@gmail.com> wrote:
Just so that everyone here is on the same page, Wikimapia is not
affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, the US-based non-profit
which operates Wikipedia and other sister projects.

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Arun Ganesh <arun.planemad@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:32 PM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would assume that the "data" they are referring to is the
>>
>> user-generated content on their website.  They cannot license the maps
>> themselves under CC BY-SA since those are licensed to them by Google.
>
>
> So this would be placemark text descriptions and not the geographical
> coordinate data. that would make sense. In any case, its a very misleading
> announcement of no real value to wikipedia.
>
> And the text itself has been added from various sources and cannot be
> considered clean. In many instances you will find text and images from
> wikipedia articles in there. So they were actually holding cc-by-sa content
> i their database under a cc-by-nc all this while. The map data will continue
> to be copyright as far as I see it.
>
>>
>>
>> See below:
>>
>> Terms of Service:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> F. All User Submissions of all users and all Wikimapia Data are freely
>> available for commercial and non-commercial use under Creative Commons
>> license Attribution-ShareAlike through WikiMapia website, WikiMapia
>> API and other current or future WikiMapia services.
>> G. Public use of Wikimapia Data and it's derivatives requires special
>> conditions:
>> a. Link to Wikimapia data original url, if viewed from any web browser
>> b. Mention of "Wikimapia.org" (with a link to http://wikimapia.org, if
>> viewed from any web browser)
>>
>> Extracted from their terms of service:
>>
>> http://wikimapia.org/terms_reference.html
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Arun Ganesh <arun.planemad@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala
>> > <arjunaraoc@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Check out:
>> >> http://wikimapia.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=9878#p194763
>> >>
>> >> A welcome change!
>> >> Hope this will increase the quality of maps in Wiki Projects.
>> >
>> >
>> > Thanks Arjuna, this is a very interesting development. And there is
>> > something quite not right about this announcement. Wikimapia maps are
>> > derived from data given by google through its api. The derived data
>> > inherits
>> > google copyright and is not cc-by-sa compatible. Moreover, the blog
>> > mentions
>> > the data is under cc-by-sa, but I dont think there is any mechanism to
>> > download the map data from wikimapia. I'm going to raise this on the
>> > openstreetmap mailing lists to figure out if this is legal.
>> >
>> > It seems to me that this is not, but will update you guys after I dig a
>> > little more.
>> > -Arun
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Regards
>> >> Arjuna
>> >>
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > j.mp/ArunGanesh
>> >
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>
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