On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:41:01 +0100, Charlie King wrote...
Quoted message said:On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 14:46:05 -0000, in
<[email hidden]> (uk.rec.walking) Tim
Jackson said:If they are re-drawing from the original commercial map, that's still
likely to infringe copyright, I'm afraid.
Well that'd be something for a lawyer to advise on, but my
understanding is that as long as you aren't actually reproducing the
unique features of the map - its style, key, graphics etc - there is
no copyright on indicating the layout of the land.
If you determined the layout of the land by surveying it independently
for yourself, that's true. Copyright protects the way the original map
expresses the underlying information about the land, but not the
underlying information itself.
But if you determined the layout by looking at a map that someone else
surveyed, then the issues would be whether there was any original
expression in the map drawn as a result of the survey, and whether you
had reproduced that.
It doesn't take much originality for copyright to subsist. To take a
clearcut example, representing the topography by contour lines would
certainly count, and you would infringe if you based your re-drawn map
on those contour lines rather than surveying your own. And it's not
hard to see that some original expression, however slight, goes into
things like deciding how to simplify the actual layout of roads, rivers,
paths, etc so as to produce a good compromise between accuracy and
clarity. How much of that expression have you taken from the original
map, rather than deciding it independently yourself?
Here's a case where the AA thought they had not taken any of the OS's
original expression, but found that in fact they had inadvertently done
so. It cost them GBP 20 million.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1203480.stm>
Quoted message said:So, while photocopying, scanning, maybe even tracing a map would risk
an infringement, I very much doubt that drawing your own freehand map
of a walk would - even if you had used a copyright map for reference.
Depends what you took from the original map. There's a continuum
between what's OK and what's not OK, so you can't always give hard and
fast answers. Tracing the map would certainly infringe. Just taking
certain isolated items of information (e.g. placenames) and adding them
to a map that you'd surveyed independently wouldn't, since there's no
copyright in the information itself, only in how it is expressed.
In between there are a lot of things that might or might not sway the
decision one way or the other, in the event that it went to court. In
my previous post, I purposely talked about *re-drawing from* the
original map, rather than just taking isolated pieces of information,
since that's very likely to involve taking part of the map's original
expression (i.e. taking how the original map represents the land, as
opposed to being just a copy of the land itself).
Quoted message said:Apart from anything else, it would be essentially impossible to tell
what map you'd used for reference - seeing as they all say the same
thing 🙂
However, they don't all say the same thing. They represent the
underlying land in different ways - and it's been suggested that the OS
include minor deliberate errors to help show when it's their map that
has been copied, rather than the underlying land.
One way to be sure that you're not taking something that's part of the
copyright-protected expression of the original map would be to compare
it with an earlier out-of-copyright map and check that it was
represented in the same way there too. But if you're going to do that
then you might just as well copy the earlier out-of-copyright map, as I
suggested previously. You would then have a very strong defence, should
the copyright owner chase you.
--
Tim Jackson
[email hidden]
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Absurd patents: visit http://www.patent.freeserve.co.uk
