On Friday 01 August 2003 09:23, Richard Bytheway wrote: > > On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Melchior FRANZ wrote: > > > > > * Jon Stockill -- Friday 01 August 2003 01:41: > > > > * On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Melchior FRANZ wrote: > > > > > London cries for a Big Ben ... > > > > > > > > That's the wrong end of the country :-) > > > > > > Yeah, but where you live you probably don't need landmarks. It's > > > the boring flat land that needs them, like big towns. (I'm not from > > > Vienna, either. :-) > > > > Sadly until the DEM gets a bit of an upgrade an awful lot of > > the country > > is rather flat - there's just not enough detail. > > > Agreed, even the lumpy bits of the UK (Pennines etc) are pretty flat compared to the middle of continental Europe. > I have considered trying to extract higher resolution DEM-like data from OS maps by scanning the maps and doing some image analysis (tracing the contour lines and roads etc), but it is a daunting task, and probably illegal too. > > Richard
The O.S. certainly hold copyright on their published maps because they are 'designs' but I can't see how thay can copyright the data itself e.g. the contours, spot-heights, roads & rivers etc. This would prevent anyone from making their own maps unless they deliberately made them inaccurate. This sort of data can't really be copyrighted as these features are part of the landscape. For example, if a certain hill is so many feet high and the O.S. mark it so on their maps, it doesn't prevent someone from going out with a theodolite, measuring it themselves and making their own map based from their own data. At the same time, the person who owns the land that the hill stands on can't stop the O.S. from surveying it and including the data about it on their maps. However, as with the Eiffel Tower thing, if a landowner incorporated a design into the land, that couldn't be regarded as part of the landscape, he might them be able to prevent that design being reproduced in a map. The O.S. might wish they could prevent people from using data they collected but there's no way to identify the source of the data. What if you estimated the height by walking up the hill, or simply just guessed it, and by co-incidence got it right - would you then be prevented from maing a map based on that? (It's just occurred to me that I could do it myself just by walking all over it with my GPS hand-held and collect the data that way). There used to be a rumour that the O.S. deliberately introduced small errors into their maps so that they could spot when they had been copied but this has been emphatically denied by them. It'd still be very hard work anyway, although untill the O.S. started collecting their data digitally, they had to digitise their maps by tracing them by hand. They had hundreds of people doing it at one time. Good job it's a small country. LeeE _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users
