But you can&#x27;t really separate these datapoints, at least not in a legally safe manner. If you take a &quot;work&quot;, reduce it down to the basic data it probably was created from and rebuild a basically identical work, how do you defend against the claim that you copied it? You could try to go through multiple steps, done by different entities, and hope to hide that way, but coordinating that makes you vulnerable again.<p>How could a project like OSM make sure that it didn&#x27;t happen on a large, clearly violating scale (because many people make copies of small parts, recreating the larger, protected work), especially if it isn&#x27;t established what an internationally safe standard is.<p>In practice, you are right, you can copy a single street from google maps to OSM. I bet some mappers in the history of OSM have traced screenshots of google maps or something. But that is only safe because it can&#x27;t be proven, unless you are unlucky enough to copy a canary.