Landon It's your choice to sign a license agreement. If you don't like terms the county offers, use the data in the way you wish and see if they stop you through litigation (and the meaningless C&D letters don't count). Many of us here have suspicions about how the county will react. Or don't use the data, don't sign the license and tell the county what they are enforcing is mean-spirited and unenforceable. The county attorney will then say "bring it on," then do the above and you'll have their attention. Be prepared for a silly lawsuit. Nothing unusual about that!
Also, keep in mind case law is not 100% clear. Feist is oft-cited because it's relevant. Get the county to sue you (or you could be plaintiff), don't settle and you will have created new case law that other courts might look to. But jurisdiction also matters (state v. federal). Bottom line is this is all very clear, except when it isn't. And litigation is the only way for this to become more clear (unless you can imagine Congress passing geo-legislation). ian Ian White :: Urban Mapping Inc. 690 Fifth Street Suite 200 :: San Francisco CA :: 94107 T.415.946.8170 x800 :: F.866.385.8266 :: urbanmapping.com/blog -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Landon Blake Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 1:55 PM To: R E Sieber; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Your data or theirs? Renee, This is an interesting post. If what you are saying is indeed true, I wonder how my local county government can make me sign a horribly restrictive license agreement to download a shapefile of the public roads in the county. The name and location of a road sounds pretty similar to the names and addresses in a telephone book. Landon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of R E Sieber Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 1:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Your data or theirs? US Copyright law protects creative works. For this situation you must add creativity to the derivation. US Copyright law doesn't allow for the mere "sweat of the brow" or "industriousness" argument. For dbs, that means you cannot claim copyright just because you spend oodles of time or money collecting geospatial data. There has to be something creative in the way you arrange it or display it. A collection of data by itself is not copyrightable. It's a mere compilation and not a creative work. The basis for judicious decisions on geospatial data comes from the US Supreme Court's case, /Feist Publications versus Rural Telephone Service/. This was a breakthough case that smashed the monopoly of telephone book companies. Basically, the ruling was that "Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright, and therefore Feist's use of them does not constitute infringement." That doesn't mean no dbs are copyrightable. If you can establish creativity in the arrangement and selection the data then you could copyright it. However, last name, first name, address and phone number don't count. Overall, it's hard to make the case for ownership on data alone. There has to be something more. Many of the rulings apply to output and not to dbs. It's easier to copyright maps than it is to copyright the digital dbs that underlie them. A lot of GIS related ownership issues are actually about maps. What Google (really Quickbird or Digiglobe or whomever) are copyrighting is the maps. Not the pixels. How creative do you have to be to claim ownership? Much of our data comes from somewhere else, for example, digitizing off of a paper map or scraping it off a website. You'd think that you'd have to create a completely new work to claim copyright but you don't. Under US law, if you add sufficient value to the derivation then you induce a transferral of ownership from the originator to yourself. (It makes me wonder if one creates an elaborate info window on Google Maps then could he/she lay claim to the data underneath the geolocation? Probably.) It's unclear, though, where that threshold for transferral is. Finally, ownership is not the same as copyright. If you want ownership then you have to apply for a copyright. Probably what you mean is does Google (or the remote sensing companes) own the map/data or can my effort put it into the public domain? Ultimately, with copyright law, it's an issue of lawyering up. If an entity wanted to contest your ownership, whether or not it has a case, it can. BTW, the last word on copyright law (US, Canada and elsewhere) is Michael Geist, at the U Ottawa. The last word on copyright law for spatial data and output is Harlan Onsrud, at U Maine Orono. Renee Christopher Schmidt wrote: > On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 12:33:49PM -0800, Mano Marks wrote: > >> Some pertainent questions: >> >> What exactly are you creating? A KML file? Your own tiles? A list of >> Lat/Long POIs? How was the list created? >> >> >From a Goog perspective: >> >> Say you create a KML file using Google Earth or use Google My Maps to >> drop down points. Who owns that? You do. >> > > Mano, > > I posed some questions in > http://www.edparsons.com/2008/10/who-map-is-it-anyway/#comments that > went unanswered on exactly this topic. Specifically, "If I'm using > satellite imagery from Google to create my data, who owns it?" You say > if you're 'dropping down points' -- you do. But Ed says that only > applies if you're dropping down points based on something that you > already knew -- so you can't drop points at, for example, intersections, > and say "It's mine". > > Additionally ,does the "dropping down points" extend to "dropping down > lines"? What happens when those lines are traced from something visible > in the satellite imagery? What happens when those lines are from > something traced from the Street Maps? > > I can't imagine the statement from Google is anything so simple as "If > you create a KML file using Google Maps data inside Google My Maps, you > own the data." > > Regards, > _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. 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