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The value of crowdsourced street-level imagery: examining the shifting property regimes of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary

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Abstract

OpenStreetCam and Mapillary are two increasingly popular online services centered on providing street-level imagery through close association with the OpenStreetMap platform and crowdmapping community. While both services provide crowdsourced street-level imagery, the differences in their aims and operations present an opportunity to discuss the various ways in which commercialization dynamics and crowdmapping practices are reshaping each other in the geoweb. This is significant because crowdmapping relies on massive distributed pools of unpaid labor, and is often characterized by a discourse and identity of community-centered sharing that eschews profit-seeking as a central motive. While the use of OpenStreetMap by commercial products is not new, the emergence of crowdsourced street-level imagery is an innovation with significant consequences. Projects like Mapillary and OpenStreetCam have the potential to both change the collaborative dynamics that drive OpenStreetMap, and simultaneously disrupt the state of street-level imagery ecosystem, which has been dominated by a single private provider: Google Street View. In light of this, crowdourced street-level imagery should be assessed, not only in technical terms, but through the full range of its political-economic ramifications. To this end, in this article we examine the role of commercialization in crowdmapped street-level imagery through a property regimes framework. Using this approach, we identify, analyze, and critique the allocation of rights, roles, and economic value within these services, thus shedding light on the emergence of crowdsourced street-level imagery in the context of the geoweb, and the digital and ‘sharing’ economies.

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Notes

  1. See the Wiki on OSM’s Organized Editing Policy (accessed Sept. 25, 2017): http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Directed_Editing_Policy.

  2. See Mapillary Legal section (accessed Sept. 1, 2017) https://www.mapillary.com/legal.

  3. This original OpenStreetView garnered over 100,000 images and 2500 users (Alex Illisei and Van Exel 2016). The visualization mechanism was similar in nature to Panoramio allowing users to click individual images on a map, although McKerrell himself posted a demonstration of how sequential streetscape photos could be acquired. See https://vimeo.com/6771405 and the project wiki page on the OpenStreetMap site at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView (2009).

  4. “You hereby grant to Telenav a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to do any act that is restricted by copyright, database right or any related right over anything within the Content, whether in the original medium or any other.  These rights explicitly include commercial use, and do not exclude any field of endeavor.  These rights include, without limitation, the right to sub-license the Content through multiple tiers of sub-licensees and to sue for any copyright violation directly connected with Telenav's rights under these Terms of Use.” (Telenav 2016a).

  5. See https://www.mapillary.com/community.

  6. See “Cooperate with Mapillary?/Difference to Mapillary?” thread on Github (accessed Sept. 25, 2017): https://github.com/openstreetcam/openstreetview.org/issues/60.

  7. Citations from OpenStreetCam’s Terms and Conditions of Use included in this section are taken from the Terms and Conditions of Use web page (Effective as of August 1, 2016, accessed August 8, 2017): https://www.openstreetcam.org/terms/.

  8. The Terms and Conditions of Use citations in this section are taken from Mapillary’s Terms and Conditions of Use web page (accessed Aug 9, 2017), unless otherwise noted. See: https://www.mapillary.com/terms.

  9. See Mapillary Legal and Licensing (accessed Sep. 21, 2017): https://www.mapillary.com/legal.

  10. See Mapillary Legal and Licensing (accessed Sep. 21, 2017): https://www.mapillary.com/legal.

  11. The Commercial Terms citations in this section are taken from Mapillary’s Commercial Use Supplement (accessed Sep. 21, 2017). See: https://www.mapillary.com/commercialterms.

  12. The Commercial Terms citations in this section are taken from Mapillary’s Commercial Use Supplement (accessed Sep. 21, 2017). See: https://www.mapillary.com/commercialterms.

  13. The Commercial Terms citations in this section are taken from Mapillary’s Commercial Use Supplement (accessed Sep. 21, 2017). See: https://www.mapillary.com/commercialterms.

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Correspondence to Luis F. Alvarez Leon.

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Alvarez Leon, L.F., Quinn, S. The value of crowdsourced street-level imagery: examining the shifting property regimes of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary. GeoJournal 84, 395–414 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9865-4

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