[Openstreetmap] Re: Mapping copyright issues and OS

[Harlan Onsrud]

Hi Roger,

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.

 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 
(http://books.nap.edu/catalog/11079.html).  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.

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.

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.

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.

Making a buck through consistent coverage:

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.

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.

When I type in 1 Potters Cross, Wootton, Bedfordshire MK43 9JG, UK 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.

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.

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.

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?

Time will tell on all these issues as the empirical evidence 
continues to roll in. Enough for today.

Best, Harlan


At 1:35 PM +0100 4/8/05, Roger Longhorn wrote:
>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.
>Computer voicemail & Fax +44 (0)870 134 6492
>E-mail: ral at alum.mit.edu
>Mobile +44 (0)7879 875288
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20050409/7b740939/attachment.html>