Chris wrote: > The very quick story is that they don't believe copyright > can be applied to any geospatial data. Thus creative > commons licenses don't work, since they depend on > copyright. So people providing data have two options - > public domain or make a contract that completely restricts it.
I'm sure that most of you have seen this, but these two free data resources (provincial and federal Canadian governements) are both employing a form of copyleft: https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/app/register/app/index.php <https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/app/register/app/index.php> http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/licence.jsp <http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/licence.jsp> They are asserting copyright and other rights, but are also requiring the user to "accept" a click-through contract to use the data. In this way they're covering all bases I guess. Early in my career I put in my fair share of time digitizing, and it's not an especially creative process. More like painting a house than painting Mona Lisa. It's a lot of work, and hard to do correctly, but you're operating within a fairly fixed set of rules. I have difficulty accepting the copyright arguments. Kamloops (Canadian municipality) takes an interesting approach. They have a click-through, but it's not asserting any rights, just disclaiming liability. Their GIS manager explained that they are essentially placing the data into public domain: http://webserver.kamloops.ca/imf/sites/DataDownload/disclaimer.html <http://webserver.kamloops.ca/imf/sites/DataDownload/disclaimer.html> We've been looking at ways of doing this at my place of employment. I prefer the Kamloops example, but have a feeling that we'll probably end up with something like the Manitoba version. Jason _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
