[Geodata] Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Promoting freely available geodata

[Jason Birch]

Chris wrote:
> The very quick story is that they don't believe copyright
> can be applied to any geospatial data.  Thus creative
> commons licenses don't work, since they depend on
> copyright.  So people providing data have two options -
> public domain or make a contract that completely restricts it.

I'm sure that most of you have seen this, but these two free data resources (provincial and federal Canadian governements) are both employing a form of copyleft:

https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/app/register/app/index.php <https://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/app/register/app/index.php> 

http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/licence.jsp <http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/licence.jsp> 

They are asserting copyright and other rights, but are also requiring the user to "accept" a click-through contract to use the data.  In this way they're covering all bases I guess.

Early in my career I put in my fair share of time digitizing, and it's not an especially creative process.  More like painting a house than painting Mona Lisa.  It's a lot of work, and hard to do correctly, but you're operating within a fairly fixed set of rules.  I have difficulty accepting the copyright arguments.

Kamloops (Canadian municipality) takes an interesting approach.  They have a click-through, but it's not asserting any rights, just disclaiming liability.  Their GIS manager explained that they are essentially placing the data into public domain:

http://webserver.kamloops.ca/imf/sites/DataDownload/disclaimer.html <http://webserver.kamloops.ca/imf/sites/DataDownload/disclaimer.html> 

We've been looking at ways of doing this at my place of employment. I prefer the Kamloops example, but have a feeling that we'll probably end up with something like the Manitoba version.

Jason