Hi Fwiw - I hold the view that the OS cannot own the status in any way as it is the Highway Authority that decides / maintains the status. The only way the OS even know about the status is by the Highway Authority telling them - as they do (and a few years later the OS *might* amend their mapping! - although I have plenty of examples where this has not been done for the past ten years). The practitioners in Cheshire County Council regard the status information as public domain and would agree wholly with West Sussex - though I have not tested it with their lawyers. I simply don't see how anyone can have copyright over something they only know about because they have been told about it by someone else! On the other hand the cartography IS copyright to the OS and clearly verboten for OSM purposes - no dispute there. So strip away the base layer and look only at the overlay.
Another way of looking at it - which is effectively just this - is that, in Cheshire at least, all of the status information is also available direct from the Highway Authority (including an on-line downloadable version) as an Excel spreadsheet that simply lists the grid references of the beginning and end of each path, its reference number and its legal status. No map involved. Does the OS have a copyright over a grid reference? It is only a mathematical transform of latitude and longitude. Do they hold copyright over latitude and longitude? And in any case, given that I would only ever be mapping paths that I had physically walked and for which I had a timed GPS trace, I know the latitude and longitude anyway (who knows which grid I have set in my GPS receiver? and I could also transform between any grids quite trivially on return to base or even eyeball which path was which once I had loaded the trace into JOSM). My bottom line is that I would never use the Highway Authority's cartography - neither as a map nor as a means of positioning a path using grid references even from a spreadsheet. But if I have walked the path and have a live GPS trace, then identifying reference number and status from the spreadsheet is surely OK. After all, if I were, say, a Finn on vacation in England I would walk the path with my GPS, recording the data in the Finnish uniform grid or some such - and then compare with the spreadsheet. On finding that the spreadsheet used something funny (called the British Grid and the OS datum) I would realise that this was how the Highway Authority had recorded their survey for the convenience of people in the UK who might want to use the data with an OS map. Having no interest in the OS or their maps, I then convert this peculiar spreadsheet thing into WGS 84 and the Finnish grid - or WGS 84 and latitude and longitude - so that I could see what's going on in my own "language". In this context the position reference is just a way of saying where something is on the Earth's surface - the "language" in which it is expressed - whether OS grid or latitude/longitude etc. is irrelevant. Mike Harris -----Original Message----- From: Nick Whitelegg [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 24 February 2009 15:35 To: Someoneelse Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] amenity=doctor or amenity=doctors ? [tagging] >Actually that raises another issue (notwithstanding the point below) - >in cases where the legal status is only available on either a copyright >map (either bought or on the wall at the local council) - it's >sometimes not possible to know what the legal status of all traffic on >e.g. a former railway line is. I'm not 100% sure whether the status on a council map is copyright actually - this has come up several times but never been definitively resolved. While the council maps are overlaid on an OS map, presumably the *council* decides the status of the path, so while the course of the path might be subject to copyright, I would assume that the status on a definitive council map is not. Also I distinctly remember one council (W Sussex) mentioning "public domain data overlaid on a copyrighted OS map". However I don't *know* this as *fact*, so do not use them as a source for status unless someone has definitely said that it's OK. Nick _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
