German OpenStreetMap making map unusable, to protest against EU copyright reform | Hacker News Reader

German OpenStreetMap making map unusable, to protest against EU copyright reform

openstreetmap.de

106 pointsTomte27 comments

Good on them. I wish more big sites would grow some balls and take action like this. The Internet as we know it is being attacked from multiple angles right now, with the EU filtering proposals, AU/5Eyes anti-encryption proposals, etc. The MSM are all onboard with the "think of the children! terrorism! what are you trying to hide?!" propaganda, and most of the big sites/services enjoy the Government contract money too much to dare upset their masters.

The FAQs on the proposed reform for anyone who, like me, was not up to speed:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/frequently...

Note that it is a very biased source and uses a lot of hedge words like "major" and other fuzzy words like "majority" which can be interpreted in diferent ways.

Per the FAQs "Article 13 of our proposal does not target services similar to Wikipedia."... just because it "does not target" does not mean it won't be unintended collateral damage. I haven't read the reform but I'm curious what safeguards it has to remove uncertainty from platform providers on if their service is effected by this.

Oh no, more evil political hacking! Placing an industry PR article into a newspaper of note is totally fine btw.

http://m.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/eu-and-copyright-...

I hope they made sure that their maps weren't being used for critical purposes like rescue operations[0] before doing this?

[0]: https://www.wired.com/2015/05/the-open-source-maps-that-made...

Only the default style has this; switching styles is literally one click.

Also Humanitarian Operations are governed by Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team [0] - they have their custom styling [1].

[0] https://www.hotosm.org/ [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_map_style

"governed" probably isn't the right word. HOT is a separate organization from OpenStreetMap. They do a lot of work editing OSM and there are people with overlapping involvement.

In addition to running their own tileserver, they also often produce large format maps in QGIS or what not.

Any company or institution that relies on OSM tiles heavily are caching them anyways because the request cap isn't that high.

Or they are running their own tileserver, generating their own map tiles, from their own local database (this is exactly what openstreetmap.de is doing), and would not be affected by this at all.

Since when do businesses hate copyright protection again? The only service providers upset by this are the ones that won't be able to copy paste maps from other sources anymore.

Not exactly true - every service will have to implement a copyright checking mechanism, which is a huge technical outlay likely to require linking in with a bigger company - which will further cement existing businesses.

Also, just about companies always being keen on furthering copyright, Disney seemed fine about it when they created steamboat Willie, Cinderella, snow white, etc, all based on prior art.

Translated from https://www.openstreetmap.de/uf/

"How can I remove the black error tiles?" – "You can't, at all. But in a few days we're going to restore functionality."

And they mean it. They haven't even made it so that a reload blacks out other tiles. No, they really want to make it utterly unusable, even with effort on the user's part.

So now the German OSM holds pretty much the same place in my heart as the German Wikimedia club.

The OSM Foundation needs to react harshly here. To think that I used StreetComplete just yesterday. That will certainly stop.

... because a single website with tons of alternatives does a small protest action you don't like you're not going to contribute to the entire project anymore? I honestly can't understand that.

A single web site that is obviously pretty officially affiliated with the OSM project proper (as far as "unofficial" can go) and loves to use my contributed data kicks me in the shins. Yes, I feel I'm justified in being mad.

Wikimedia Germany is also legally seoparate from the Wikimedia Foundation, and still everyone considers them the official German offshoot.

I guess I don't see how having to visit openstreetmap.org or any other site instead of .de if you want to look at a map for a few days is a "kick in the shins", especially since "providing a map viewing website" is not the goal of the OpenStreetMap orgs, neither the Foundation nor the local chapters. (one certainly can argue if maybe they should do have that goal, but they explicitly don't, regularly repeated when people suggest adding end-user features to the site)

They represent OSM in Germany, they think it's in OSM's best interest to draw attention to this issue, they do so on their own website, leaving all tile servers etc alone. I can see being momentarily annoyed at it, I can see disagreeing with them (politically or if that's a useful protest form), but I don't see anything that would count as a gross violation of trust or something that's out of scope for a local chapter to do.

Hm, I'll think about it. Have an upvote.

You contributed the data so that they - and everyone else - can do what they want with it as long as they stay within the terms of the license. I don't see that they are violating the license by choosing to render that data a certain way (in this case as a black tile).

German OpenStreetMap is not a third party who is only bound by the copyright license though - it's a contributors' community with various explicit and implicit expectations. See e.g. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct

Parent never claimed that the license was violated though. You can be unhappy about something legal.

> A single website whose maps are used by hundreds of apps and websites with millions of users[0][1]

FTFY

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/They_are_using_OpenStree...

[1]https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...

I'm aware that OSM is widely used (I'm a contributor to it), what does that have to do with the fact that a single website, http://openstreetmap.de, choose to do this kind of protest and not display some map tiles? So no FTFY, those hundreds of apps and millions of users are not affected by this protest. If they were, I'd probably agree with OP in their criticism.

You’re confusing OpenStreetMap data (used by millions) with the openstreetmap.de rendered tiles (used by a handful of Germans).

>No, they really want to make it utterly unusable, even with effort on the user's part.

The only basemap which has blocked tiles is OSM deutscher Stil, you can easily switch to the other three. Would argue that is very usable with very little effort on the user's part.

Cool, I didn't realize that.

The FAQ I quote-translated could have mentioned that, instead of saying "there is no way".

Everyone will work around then. They want you to see copyright error tiles.

> They haven't even made it so that a reload blacks out other tiles.

Reload blocks different tiles.

If the measures they are protesting against go forward, you will have even more to be upset about.

After all, isn't the purpose of a protest to be inconvenient and draw attention?

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