POI Factory is a great bargain!

Not only is it expensive, you don't get the colabortive spirit that you get here...not to mention the great ppl's personalities.

Couldn't agree more...

I agree.

exactly

A great site and a great bunch of people

I seriously doubt you'll do any better than this site-

It's quite enlightening to read their Terms & Conditions...
http://shop.gps-poi-us.com/termsandconditions.sc

It starts off with how the data is copyrighted and it's all theirs....but if you scroll down to "Consumer Agreement", they seem to acknowledge that the data has actually come from Yahoo! and Google's Geocoding services!
(Not their's to sell, in other words).

You can copyright a "collection" of otherwise public information or information that is actually owned by someone else. The individual entries cannot be copyrighted but the collection as a whole can be. The legal qualifying buzz-word is "collection". You're basically paying a service fee for their clerical services of compiling and editing a collection of data that they did not originally create.

I started reading about the case law they quote
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...
...all fascinating stuff.

(Sometimes it makes you register for an account and sometimes it doesn't?)

Of course, I'm totally unqualified to comment on the legality of it -- but I'd place a bet that Google and Yahoo! would revoke their Geocoding API 'keys', if they knew what they were being used for!

I agree again

The section you quoted doesn't seem to say anything like what you are suggesting. I see nothing that says that the data comes from Yahoo and Google.

You assume that Google and Yahoo is the source of the geocoding. Perhaps the geocoding is done by a commercial service that requires payment?

Well, they seem to state clearly that the geocoding comes from Yahoo and Google.

... IF you can find a street address in Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest then that location should be accurate in our data. IF a street address can not be located in those services, then our data will also get close, but not precisely to the address. ... When you can't find an address in MapQuest, Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, one of the potential reasons is that the geocoding engine doesn't understand the address, ...

But it doesn't say that the data comes from Yahoo or Google as it does with the POI Harvester program (which is why files created with that software can't be uploaded here.)

What's more interesting to me is this statement, "We are assembling publicly available data to you.

So they are charging for data that is publicly available which is interesting. Yes they are doing the work (I guess) to assemble it, but as has been indicated above, we are doing that here for free. And doing it BETTER!

Why would the statement "we are assembling publicly available data to you" be interesting? All POI locations are public by nature. How would a location be "not public?"

Because they are charging for it. And anyone who didn't bother to read that page might not realize that they are paying for data that is freely available. People might think that the site was paying for the data which clearly they are not. I think that that's interesting that's all.

And I would argue that many people might not realize that the data is publicly available. Just because they might know the location of their local Target store, they might not realize that a list of all the Target stores in the country is publicly available.