[OSM-legal-talk] Atlas publishing software (legal-talk angle)

OJW streetmap at blibbleblobble.co.uk
Mon Mar 5 20:26:52 GMT 2007


Somebody mentioned on this list that nobody would make a book or atlas from 
OSM data unless they get exclusive copyright to it, which sounded like a 
rather old-fashioned idea in the world of on-demand publishing, international 
mapping projects, and print bureaus worldwide who accept emailed PDFs.

I'm not entirely sure why it's a choice between restrictively-licensed 
products, and no products at all. But I guess selling free-to-copy things  
isn't as much fun as selling illegal-to-copy things?

People have also mentioned that OSM isn't about creative outputs, which is 
weird when most of what we do is map images, road atlases, wikipedia 
articles, featured images on the wiki, posters, cartography conferences, city 
websites, and loads of other things that can only be described as creative 
work.

So to give a boost to anyone considering Creative-Commons publishing of OSM 
data, I've done a PDF-generation tool for formatting our maps ready for 
print.  See the email on talk-list, or a wiki page will soon appear at  
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/ImgAtlas

It even keeps track of the images you add and puts an list of attributions at 
the end with licensing information.  So Geograph images, flickr images and 
such like should be easy to integrate, as should data from any other 
Creative-Commons project.

Regards,

OJW





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