[Openstreetmap] Mapping copyright issues and OS

Roger Longhorn ral at alum.mit.edu
Fri Apr 8 13:35:54 BST 2005


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 March-April 1997 - 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.

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.

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

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.

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:

"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]

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.

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/ ]

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).

Kind regards

Roger Longhorn
ral at alum.mit.edu
Director, I-DRA Limited and
GIScience Group, City University

======================================
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:58:00 +0100
From: Andrew Birkett <andy at nobugs.org>
Subject: Re: [Openstreetmap] geodriving results
To: openstreetmap at vr.ucl.ac.uk
Message-ID: <1112857080.27543.2.camel at localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 07:45 +0200, Amaury Jacquot wrote:
 > > - What data, if any, can we avoid gathering on the ground (eg points of
 > > interest, street names, road designations, urban/rural land designation)?
 >
 > designations are not copyrightable.

There's an interesting discussion about Ordnance Survey copyright and
related issues, courtesy of the British Cartograph Society, at:

http://www.cartography.org.uk/Pages/Membership/DesignG/Copyrit.html

Note that the OS weren't involved in the article (despite the
question/answer format).  I think the Ordnance Survey side of the
discussion is extracted from published OS regulations.

Andrew
==============================
Roger A. Longhorn
Director, Info-Dynamics Research Associates Ltd
EC Projects Office
1A Potters Cross, Wootton
Bedfordshire MK43 9JG, U.K.
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E-mail: ral at alum.mit.edu
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