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--></style><title>Re: Mapping copyright issues and
OS</title></head><body>
<div>Hi Roger,</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Yes, I fully agree that each of us lives in the context of our
own political, economic and legal systems and one size does indeed not
fit all. Having said this, if one finds a winning formula
relative to the competition it makes little sense to change that
formula until the competition starts catching up.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>From a U.S. perspective there are many reasons for not supporting
the charging for geographic data by government agencies which are
outlined in the recent licensing report (<font face="Lucida Grande"
size="-1"
color="#000000">http://books.nap.edu/catalog/11079.html</font>).
One of the reasons listed is that government-produced data at taxpayer
expense originally developed for some specific government purpose
provides valuable raw material (which is never consumed or used up)
upon which the private sector may thrive. If other nations need
to or desire to follow a different route in respect to their copyright
laws and the government relationship with their private sector
companies that is fine and perhaps as it should be. The belief and
empirical evidence to date is that the U.S. approach works for the
U.S. and is allowing our private companies to compete vigorously with
each other and internationally. Thus at the current time there is
little need to alter the current policies.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>In respect to the provisioning of simple geographic data, lets
take my address as an example. I live in a small town in one of
the poorer rural states in the U.S. There is no consistent cadastral
mapping across the U.S. nor across my State of Maine. Rather,
the extent and security you have in your boundaries is largely
responsive to the economic value of your property. If it
matters, your can determine your boundaries very accurately and with
high confidence but if it doesn't matter you don't spend the money.
Urban areas tend to have well-defined secure boundaries and rural
areas don't. This responsiveness to market value is perceived as
a very good thing even though surveyors and engineers are always
advocating for increased precision, as they well should from their
perspective.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I happen to live in a small rural town (5000 people) and the town
has contracted out its GIS to a private firm rather than supporting
its own operation. Town officials through a computer technician
can generate their own maps from the distant database or order up a
map or analysis at any time from the private company. This seems to
work fine under the current circumstances although many other small
towns run their own operations. Diversity of options is good.
All the towns gain some coordination, standards and education support
through a Statewide Office of GIS that also provides lots of data to
the towns. This office has almost no core State funding but
thrives because it does a very good job of coordinating among state
and local governments who are more than willing to give the office a
cut of their budget for the valuable services rendered. Yes the State
Office does charge for some data but they consistently pursue the need
to keep as much of their data as possible freely available as a public
resource from which communities and businesses may build. The coverage
of the level of detail in my State is very inconsistent but the belief
is that this approach is very responsive to the marketplace and/or the
specific needs for government. Again this is good thing. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If someone can make a buck by providing consistent coverage
across the entire nation they should go ahead and do so. This approach
may not be efficient from an engineering perspective but is perceived
as being very efficient from an economic perspective.</div>
<div><br>
Making a buck through consistent coverage:<br>
</div>
<div>If I go to Google "local" and type in "pharmacy"
and Orono, Maine. I get a nice map showing all the pharmacies
within a ten mile radius of my small town and I can go to a detailed
map showing where each is located. I can do this for many
businesses and for virtually any location in a very large nation.
If I go to http://maps.google.com/ and type in orono maine I obtain
again a map of my community and can click on satellite imagery showing
my home. I can get door to door driving instructions from my
house to my cousin's home three thousand miles away on the west coast
through Mapquest or competing services. All of these
capabilities are provided completely free to me as a citizen by
private companies and presumably they are making lots of money off of
these services.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Such services have been made possible in the U.S. to millions of
people that use them everyday because lots of companies played with
and developed successive spatial data products and services based on
real geographic data that had no intellectual property strings
attached. Yes, trickle down technologies from defense
investments are also significant. USGS, while it has other important
functions in support of core infrastructure development, has from my
perspective long been out of the mapping business for everyday users.
This is as it should be. I personally don't want them competing
with the private sector when the private sector can adequately meet
needs for private and government purposes. If the private sector can't
supply what they need whether defined in terms of reliability,
accuracy or otherwise, government of course is free to step in and
obtain what they need. Government agencies however are expected to
stick to their mandates as established by legislated authority and
arrived at through a political process. Developing new models for the
more efficient sharing and archiving of geographic data is still
within the ambit of the USGS, whether through providing frameworks
like the National Map, Geospatial One-stop, or otherwise and it is in
the context of experimenting with additional sharing and market
frameworks that my previous comments were made. I know of no one
in the U.S. that would want the USGS or any other single federal
agency to provide the level of detail that the Ordnance Survey, for
example, provides. The vast majority of the population believes that
is best left to the private sector and the USGS approaches generally
support this belief. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>When I type in<font color="#000000"> 1 Potters Cross, Wootton,
Bedfordshire MK43 9JG, UK</font> in the above Google or Mapquest
capabilities I don't get results. Perhaps you have similar free
capabilities for all locations in the U.K. and/or throughout
Europe.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If you do, will those free capabilities be able to continue to
compete with the googles that obviously want to expand their economic
model to coverage spanning the globe.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If you don't, why didn't your national mapping agency provide
this free service years ago? Are mapping agencies that claim copyright
or other forms of ownership in location/geographic data likely to be
responsive to the variety of market models being pursued by the
private sector in the U.S. and that will be pursued globally. Perhaps
the Ordnance Survey is better able to respond than agencies in many
other countries. But this does raise the issue as to whether any
agency or quasi-agency should be in the business of competing with the
private sector from a practical perspective in other than niche
markets.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>A private company has few qualms about thinking globally. I
know my local government GIS administrator is not thinking in terms of
global coverage or services. Will the Ordnance Survey or any other
government mapping agency in Europe expand their vision to think in
terms of global coverage and services? This is the competitive market
in which they will obviously have to compete. Or would European
government agencies have been better off supplying the raw materials
to allow all of the private businesses in their nation to compete
better with each other both at home and globally. Who will buy
from and buy out who? Ten years from now is it more likely that
Ordnance Survey will buy out Google or that Google will buy out the
private sector functions of the Ordnance Survey?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Time will tell on all these issues as the empirical evidence
continues to roll in. Enough for today.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Best, Harlan</div>
<div> </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At 1:35 PM +0100 4/8/05, Roger Longhorn wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Please note that the discussion on
copyright from the British Cartographic Society's archive, referred to
below by Andrew, is from material and interviews/lectures from<b>
March-April 1997</b> - 8 years ago - and two years before OS GB became
a UK "Trading Fund", under which government
sanctioned/mandated "full cost recovery" regime OS GB then
proceeded to operate.<br>
<br>
Much of the text relating to copyright protection in the BCS archive
article is still relevant and it is always interesting to hear again
OS attitudes towards IPR protection from nearly a decade ago. However,
new initiatives relating to exploitation of public sector information
(PSI) based on an EC Directive that must be enacted in national law in
all EU Member States by 1 July 2005, may have some future impact on OS
GB (and other UK trading funds) - or not - we have yet to see. The
Directive (and one assumes national legislation to enact it) does not
affect "crown copyright" as such nor appears to impact on
how individual EU Member States handle "cost recovery"
regimes.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
Since 1997, there has also been a change in the UK Copyright Act (now
1998) also due to an EU Directive (Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC) and
yet further new Regulations were enacted in October 2003 resulting
from the EC's Directive on Copyright and Related Rights. Additional
legislation is working its way through the EU Institutions which will
later<br>
<br>
Trade (i.e. buying and selling) digital geospatial data may also
governed by the EC's Electronic Commerce Directive, enacted in the UK
by the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) (Extension) (No. 2)
Regulation 2003 (Statutory Instrument 2003 No. 2500) -(I kid you not
on the title!) and is covered by standard regulations on trading in
goods and services, including consumer protection legalisation.<br>
<br>
More open access to different levels and scales of GI from government
agencies (generally - but not necessarily OS GB) who hold
important geospatial datasets was further modified by HMSO directions
on licensing reproduction of Crown Copyright material in 2000 and now
by the current UK Freedom of Information Act, enacted this year. The
28 January 2003 EU Directive on access to environmental data (which is
almost exclusively geospatial in nature), now enacted in law in the UK
and other EU Member States, specifically states that:<br>
<br>
"Public authorities should be able to make a charge for supplying
environmental information but such a charge should be reasonable. ...
In particular cases, where public authorities make available
environmental information on a commercial basis, and where this is
necessary in order to guarantee the continuation of collecting and
publishing the such information, a market-based charge is considered
to be reasonable; an advance payment may be required..." [DIR
2003/4/EC - Preamble para 18]<br>
<br>
My point? There are a whole raft of policy-oriented and legislative
issues relating to access to and use of geodata - as raw data, as data
products (value added), as derived products, as services, etc. - other
than just copyright law and practices. Many of these issues are not
directly related to whether of not OS GB (or UK Hydrographic Office or
the UK Met Office or any of the other 15+ UK "Trading Funds"
who are or were formerly UK government agencies funded by the
Treasury) charge for their data, products and services. Charging
regimes are an act of the government of the day, not IPR legislation.
As we have seen in regard to the PSI Directive (to become law in the
UK in 3 months time - 1 July 2005), even that legislation, which has
the main underlying theme that all government data should be as openly
available - and *exploitable* - as possible, is highly unlikely to
have a direct impact on the charging practices of existing UK Trading
Funds.<br>
<br>
Note that the above intervention is neither a defense of UK Trading
Fund regimes, nor a diatribe agains them - but rather a (hopefully)
educational excursion exposing the many different sides to the debate,
some of which we hope will be more fuly explored at the 14 April Open
Geodata Forum evening meeting in London. [For a more detailed look at
the issues, please see the Journal of Digital Information article by
myself and Prof. Mike Blakemore, downloadable from
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Longhorn/ ]<br>
<br>
While the technology issues are quite fascinating (and I was trained
as an engineer - BSc, MSc at MIT, 1976 - not a lawyer!), in the past
decade or more, while acting as an expert in information services and
markets to the European Commission (not only in GI areas), I have seen
all too many cases where excellent and exciting project work was done
- technically - only to be made unusable in the future due to policy
(good and bad) and legislative restrictions. Project such as
OpenStreetMap are already aware of this - but it is up to such
projects to continue to spread that awareness to legislators and
decision makers at all levels, from local government right up to EU
MEPs, national government ministers (who comprise the numerous EU
Councils of Minsters) and high EC officials (who direct the drafting
of the initial Directives in the first place).</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
Kind regards<br>
<br>
Roger Longhorn<br>
ral@alum.mit.edu<br>
Director, I-DRA Limited and<br>
GIScience Group, City University<br>
<br>
======================================<br>
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:58:00 +0100<br>
From: Andrew Birkett <andy@nobugs.org><br>
Subject: Re: [Openstreetmap] geodriving results<br>
To: openstreetmap@vr.ucl.ac.uk<br>
Message-ID: <1112857080.27543.2.camel@localhost><br>
Content-Type: text/plain<br>
<br>
On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 07:45 +0200, Amaury Jacquot wrote:<br>
> > - What data, if any, can we avoid gathering on the ground
(eg points of<br>
> > interest, street names, road designations, urban/rural land
designation)?<br>
><br>
> designations are not copyrightable.<br>
<br>
There's an interesting discussion about Ordnance Survey copyright
and<br>
related issues, courtesy of the British Cartograph Society, at:<br>
<br>
http://www.cartography.org.uk/Pages/Membership/DesignG/Copyrit.html<br
>
<br>
Note that the OS weren't involved in the article (despite the<br>
question/answer format). I think the Ordnance Survey side of
the<br>
discussion is extracted from published OS regulations.<br>
<br>
Andrew<br>
==============================<br>
Roger A. Longhorn<br>
Director, Info-Dynamics Research Associates Ltd<br>
EC Projects Office<br>
1A Potters Cross, Wootton<br>
Bedfordshire MK43 9JG, U.K.<br>
Computer voicemail & Fax +44 (0)870 134 6492<br>
E-mail: ral@alum.mit.edu<br>
Mobile +44 (0)7879 875288</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
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