All the technical issues here have already been solved a hundred times, there's plenty of other options. It's a little worrying that we're eliminating punctuation in real life because of issues with integrating with geographical databases.
I know a business which has to pay a nominal $1 license fee for the names of its own stores to a map maker, simply because the business has lost any evidence that it had the names before the map maker put them in the map.
That's untrue; facts can't be copyrighted. Whether there's a road sign or not, the name of the road is not subject to copyright, but if there is a road sign, then it's really easy to prove that your claim about the road is an uncopyrightable fact.
From your link, which is quite short:
> such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "collective work") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory.
So you'd have to ask yourself, "was any creativity, of any kind at all, required in order to call this street by its own name?" And the answer is even more obviously "no" than in the paradigm case in which the telephone directory can't be copyrighted because it consists of facts (involving no creativity) in an externally specified order (alphabetical) in a collection specified by an external rule ("everything is included").
facts are not copyrightable
That's purely an unforced error on the part of OpenStreetMap. They are incorporated in England, which recognizes a database right. But there is no reason for that. In general, there is no such thing as a database right.
And this isn't even relevant to londons_explore's point; he is stupidly arguing that even if the information is available on a road sign, the public cannot use it because it might be included in a protected work somewhere. That is obviously untrue; the availability on the road sign does in fact automatically mean that inclusion in a protected work is irrelevant.
If you see a sign giving you the name of a road, and then publish information to the effect that the road's name is what is printed on that sign, no database was involved at any point, and a database right cannot apply. All you have is a bare fact.
Centuries old Irish language place names get replaced with bastard gaelicised versions of their English names, and now you’ve a mishmash of signage all over the place. Often the new names are just an invention of the council that sort of sounds right.
It is always better to consult extensive OSM wiki to figure out how something should be tagged rather than try to figure out based on existing examples.
In case of names here is relevant guide: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names
And people believe anything that comes out of a computer regardless of thousands of signs that something is really not right.
They rather prosecute others without doubt on mass scale rather than look into themselves.
(see the Post Office scandal)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265929
> As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific database itself, but the standard they are required to record geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS 7666".
On the other hand, you’re naïve if you think English hasn’t already been simplified to fit on machinery such as typewriters and cheap printing presses. This process began long before computers.
Even cheap printing presses could handle more than you think. Here's a type case layout from 1846, again with æ, œ, fl, ff, and ffi, fi and ffl. https://archive.org/details/printingapparatu00holtrich/page/... .
That book is for the "Parlour printing press [which] was invented by Mr. Cowper for the amusement and education of youth, by enabling them to print any little subject they had previously written, provided the printing did not exceed in size the dimensions of an ordinary duodecimo page, which measures about 5 inches by 3 inches."
I also wouldn't call those typewriters or cheap printing presses.
þ's disappearance from English is not due to either, though the lack of þ in available type faces was certainly an issue.
Press quality issues are things like "are the surfaces flat" / "how much pressure can the press apply" / "how many pages can we press before running into a mechanical issue".
I do get your point, but I think it's still wrong to use "cheap" to refer to the typefaces available for the Caxton and KJV Bibles. I suspect they were quite expensive.
The physical press is only part of the printing cost. The Linotype typesetting machine made it possible to set an entire line of type, drawing from a 90 or so characters. While the press itself didn't care, adding new symbols required manual effort, making it more expensive.
I don't think this argument quite works; something can be stunningly expensive, in an absolute sense, at the same time that it's the shoddy low-price option people choose for budget reasons.
Sure, it can be, but was it?
The KJV was very expensive as it was. ("Robert Barker invested very large sums in printing the new edition, and consequently ran into serious debt" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version .) That doesn't mean they used a shoddy low-price option.
On one hand we have systems supporting Unicode and just about every character imaginable, it's an example of using technology to go beyond the limitations of the past. You could have a system that supports emojis on street signs, but instead we're going the opposite direction and introducing artificial limitations that are even more restrictive than 500 year-old technology.