One think I have noticed, but haven't checked out how widespread this is,It usually depends on what you sign your name to in a contract. If there's no contract, and you just download something off the web and do what you like with it, it's not likely anything will happen other than to drive the data provider to stop doing you (and everyone else) any favors. And even with a contract, some situations may be questionable. In the US, the Supreme Court decision on Feist vs. Rural Communications kind of threw a potential monkey wrench into the copyright issue (especially for geospatial data), and 3 years later Congress still hasn't got it together on what they want to do about it. In Feist, the court basically ruled that a compilation of facts, even if it costs a great deal of money to compile, is not protected under US copyright law. They said for copyright protection there needs to be some aspect of unique creative expression. Digital map data hardly qualifies under that definition. That could possibly mean that a satellite photo or a street map is just a "compilation of facts", and therefore wide open to pirates. (Hur, hur! wi' a curse!) Certainly simply reformatting public-domain data sets and selling them (or giving them away) could very well fall under this ruling. It might just be that you can do what you please with digital mapping data. Wouldn't that be fun for the GIS industry?
that struck me the wrong way was a condition acknowledgement of use of
digital data. I can see why, but to clean up some "free" data, resell it at
a relatively high price, and then demand that users include an "add" for
background in a report figure seems a little excessive.
Coming up in the next GeoWorld, Bob Hoch has written an interesting column about the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act waiting for the next Congress. Several times Congress has tired to overturn Feist, but all efforts so far have failed. This problem of providing incentive for people to create databases or reassemble existing public data into a useful compilation (and have their efforts protected) versus leaving things wide open and driving all data developers into a corner (thus probably killing GIS markets right and left) ought to be a hot one.
- Bill Thoen
