On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 05:59:59PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > One of the (few) benefits of having used the term GeoDRM for the > > present geo-rights work is that it does flush out people who are > > mainly looking for a demon to hunt and use abusive language > > rather than actually talking and thinking about how intellectual > > property rights work for all Web users. > > That's not the case in geodata. What we have is a bunch of > European national government agencies that for centuries gathered > geodata, paid for by the tax payers, and now they are selling it > by the minute as if they were a private entity that owned it. > While in fact we, the people, own them.
And *no* level of rights management, technical or otherwise, is going to be the primary factor in changing that. The problem is, at its heart, a social one, and a naming convention, or even social and technical decisions made by OGC, will not change the fact that there is a large social block against sane treatment of geographic data collected by European National Mapping Agencies. Blaming the OGC for that is ridiculous. > Any > DRM scheme is just a means for those agencies to keep a lock on > the data. And you'd rather have the data not be available at all? How is providing a way for data to be used in some limited way making the situation worse than it already is? That's like saying that Google is making a bad situation worse by making data available in the way that they are able to -- by licensing the data, and making it available through their interface. Should Google stop doing that, because it means that the NMAs are less likely to release the data somehow? That argument seems to be completely backwards to me. Making the technical means available for users to establish protection of their data *may* lead some organizations to provide more data, since they know it can be protected. The idea that creating a technical solution to a problem is going to make the social situation around that problem *worse* seems wrong. If you have a problem with closed geographic data, go to the source. Shooting someone creating a technical solution to a technical problem seems like a mistake, even if you disagree that the technical solution is the correct way to go. I don't know if GeoDRM is a good idea. I think that the establishment of metadata standards makes sense, and if that is part of what GeoDRM provides, then perhaps that part of it, at least, makes sense. Regardless of whether it makes sense or not, complaining that GeoDRM will allow providers to prevent people from using data in a way that they aren't allowed to by the data provider is ridiculous. Until an example situation is raised where GeoDRM prevents the user from doing something they should be allowed to do *by the agreement with the data provider*, it's not doing anything other than enforcing agreements with that data provider. If the data provider can enforce their license, and you don't *like* that license, that isn't GeoDRM's fault, and blaming the technology for the social problem that is the attitude of NMAs towards reuse of data is shooting the messenger... worse because the messenger hasn't even started delivering his message yet. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
