[OSM-talk] Fw: [Geowanking] China policy on Mapping Data

[Mike Collinson]

By all means have a go, but I would not expect much enthusiasm in the 
short or medium term.  :-( In 1996, we caused, er, raised eyebrows 
merely scanning in a Shenzhen tourist map free at the hotel in order 
to do a vehicle tracking demo.

Note the key issues in the original article relate to 1) *Foreigners* 
collecting data on Chinese soil and 2) exporting the data - i.e. 
carrying a switched-on GPS device and then taking it back out through 
an airport would require permission. I'd advise extreme discretion on 
anyone thinking of doing this. Note also that this might also cover 
Hong Kong SAR (I'm not sure) so I've dropped any plan to collect 
there on a next trip through.

Mike
Manila

At 12:37 AM 6/01/2007, Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:
>Mikel Maron wrote:
> > Any current or planned OSM activity in China?
>
>What's China's policy on copyright of official maps? I think if OSM can
>import official maps, we wouldn't need to survey China - the idea of OSM
>is to get a useful map of the world, not to uncover military secrets /
>censorship etc. If the Chinese government don't want us to put their
>military bases or whatever in the map, that's fine, just like we don't
>put Area 51 in the map in the USA. It wasn't long ago that OS didn't put
>UK military bases on it's maps.
>
>Maybe mapping Chinese nuclear bases, Area 51 and other secret places is
>a worthy aim, but I don't think it should be ours - we've got enough
>other problems to worry about.
>
>Perhaps we should just ask the Chinese Embassy what roads we are allowed
>to include under the new law, and see what they say. I think we should
>try to work with them to get their data, so that we can encourage other
>governments to share data as well, rather than work against them,
>risking all sorts of dangers to get data that is probably less useful in
>the end.
>
>Robert (Jamie) Munro