[OSM-talk] Soviet military maps copyright status

Kristian Thy thy at 42.dk
Tue Jan 16 13:15:12 GMT 2007


I've been looking at georeferencing some of the Soviet military maps
floating around on the 'net (mostly from poehali.org), sticking them
into a WMS and, through the wonder that is standardized
interoperability, loading them into JOSM and digitizing the major road
networks, placenames and so on. Naturally, before doing this I would
like to be sure that this data would be acceptable by OSM.

* The maps are mentioned on the wiki under "out-of-copyright mapping",
  leading me to think that someone has evaluated this at some point.
* The maps are freely available from Poehali.org, a US-based corporation
  who also writes on their site:

	"The map collection is gathered with a help of the community of
	 tourists and travelers on a free basis through the website
	 poehali.org. It is available for free use, free of charge."

  The maps are watermarked, but according to the text on the wiki
  regarding the Bridgeman v Corel ruling poehali can't claim copyright.

Those are the pros for the maps being in the public domain. My line of
thinking is that Poehali.org - an LLC based in North Carolina - would
have made sure their back is free before starting their business in the
litigious US ;)

The cons are the lengthy flamewar on Wikipedia's PD-USSR template[1]
and some rather well written posts on the 'net[2], but they seem to
pertain to the rights of individual authors, not works created by the
now defunct Soviet government.

I would really like to hear people's opinion on this. Of course, any
data digitized from this would be attributed with a proper source tag so
it could be easily removed in case of later legal issues.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-USSR
[2]: For instance, http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0503b&L=seelangs&D=1&F=&S=&P=1359

For an example of what the maps look like, together with an overlay of
the existing OSM data for Estonia, you may have a look at
http://quovadis.dk/osm/topo/

\\kristian
-- 
Cthulhu.call();




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