Charts II: NGA - 2700 Charts

[z.stadler]

Copyright rights mean, amongst other things, that copyright owners can sell copies of the material and limit the distribution in (almost) any way they desires.



P.S., I doubt anyone will publicly say they have kept copies of the "newly copyrighted" material...

[Rick Scali]

is it possible that anyone had the foresight to have downloaded the "kap" files that were already created for this project including the now withdrawn regions just for safe keeping of course, ?

[bcn]

And you might ask somebody to put his head under the axe???

[dougwm10]

Correct me if I am wrong but these charts were downloaded when they were freely available without restriction so how can they now be be reclaimed.

Since the original downloads and through the dedicated efforts of many contributors they have ALL been altered and corrected so that they bear no resembelence to the original downloads apart from the coastal outlines - which are not copyrighted.

So in their new gestation ie altered and saved how can the original distributor claim that they belong to them and are subject to their copyright.

To my mind they are now sufficiently changed from the originals that they must be considered to be owned by the developers of the changes.

So just get on with completing and issuing them for use with Opcn.

[dacust]

Originally Posted by dougwm10

Correct me if I am wrong but these charts were downloaded when they were freely available without restriction so how can they now be be reclaimed.

Since the original downloads and through the dedicated efforts of many contributors they have ALL been altered and corrected so that they bear no resembelence to the original downloads apart from the coastal outlines - which are not copyrighted.

So in their new gestation ie altered and saved how can the original distributor claim that they belong to them and are subject to their copyright.

To my mind they are now sufficiently changed from the originals that they must be considered to be owned by the developers of the changes.

So just get on with completing and issuing them for use with Opcn.

I'm not sure what thread you have been following. But, in the process used in THIS thread, almost NOTHING has been altered in any way. The images are completely unaltered except for where they have been cropped into smaller pieces for the insets. Other than that, the ONLY work done on them has been to create a calibration text file and convert them into .kap format. So the basic premise of your argument is completely and catastrophically wrong. ANY barely competent image professional could prove beyond ANY doubt that the .kaps created came directly from the images on the NGA website. Especially since the originals are JPGs so there will be anomalies unique to those images, and those alone.

Secondly, just because there was no warning that all rights were reserved, does not mean they weren't protected. You don't have to state that something is copyrighted to make it so. You may have to in order to have much of a chance at a lawsuit, but with the opponent being the government, you wouldn't catch ME trying to put that to the test.

-dan

[Tia Bu]

It is very difficult to see how the public good is being served by government agencies' insisting on intellectual property rights here. At least it doesn't seem the U.S. government agency is the real culprit. The real rat smells like the UK Hydrographic Office (and maybe SHOM?)

The public good is clearly served by free dissemination of this cartographic material. The work to compile it was largely done long ago at the expense of the public. If you drill right down to heart of the issue, this is a case of one or two government agencies trying to pad their budgets by placing the public's safety at risk. Small boat owners are going to sea with incomplete chart coverage because they can't afford the bloody charts. That's a clear safety hazard, not just to the boaters, but also to the other government employees who have to go out and rescue them when they get in trouble.

It wouldn't cost the government agencies in question anything, except a little bit of foregone revenue, to let us continue what we've been working on. Most of the government agencies' revenue from chart sales surely comes from commercial shipping. And the commercial guys aren't going to be using our charts. Our charts would not meet their legal carriage requirements. So the potential foregone revenue to the government agencies would appear to be minimal. This is a nutty decision on the part of the agencies who are pushing it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't come as a result of political pressure from the few private companies who profit from the sale of these charts.

If I felt the U.S. agency (the NGA) was the culprit here, I'd write to my congressman. But that may be a job for some of our European brethren, in this particular case.

I hope this turns out better in the near future. At the very least, I hope NGA will let us distribute the .KAPS for the regions they are still displaying online.

[Rick Scali]

I agree! Tia Bu's statement "I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't come as a result of political pressure from the few private companies who profit from the sale of these charts." was my first thought.

[idpnd]

The problem is that the NGA doesnt own the charts originally issued by other countries' agencies, which dont have the US legal requirement of publishing taxpayer funded data for free.. Its a shame, huge amounts of work went into this! Hopefully the existing KAPs will make their way online somehow.

[r.fairman]

without predudice

If you explore the nga charts via the intereractive catalog all the withdrawn regions are still there Dezoom still works

an opportunity y/n

richard

[z.stadler]

Several charts have both

"Copyright <YEAR> by the United States Government."

and

"No copyright claimed under Title 17 u.s.c."

Anyone knows what does it mean?

Can the US Government claim a copyright given the "No copyright claimed" declaration on the charts themselves?

[nohal]

Zeev...
That's why we started this project (see Copyright status of work by the U.S. government - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). From the latest developments it looks like the NGA is not at all sure that what they wrote on the charts was true...

Pavel

[idpnd]

Thats what you get for asking too many questions

[svrevelations]

I'm not sure what is happening to this project as it seems to have run into copyright issues.
Do you guys still require the server space?
If you do, no problem and things will simply continue.
If you don't, the server needs to be cleaned up.

[Tia Bu]

Could someone who knows what's going on please give us a status update?

[svrevelations]

BUMP!

Originally Posted by MooseMoney

I'm not sure what is happening to this project as it seems to have run into copyright issues.
Do you guys still require the server space?
If you do, no problem and things will simply continue.
If you don't, the server needs to be cleaned up.