Charts II: NGA - 2700 Charts

[r.fairman]

sorry no one has replied. I for one am asking that ther server space remains as is until the Nga situation can be finally resolved Thanks for your help in this project

richard

[Tia Bu]

Richard, I take it from your response that there is still some discussion going on with NGA? Do you know this first-hand, or are you assuming it? If there are discussions, could someone with first-hand knowledge at least post a note here saying discussions are ongoing? Or is this just dead forever?

As separate issue, could people who have worked on the project get copies of the charts off the server for their own personal use? This could be handled by password-only access for a couple of days.

[nohal]

Sorry guy, I took a few days off the computer... Thought I deserve it sometimes. As we can see at NOAA's On-Line Chart Viewer the situation settled down on regions 1,5 and 9 being still available which gives us hope that at least these are covered with Title 17, U.S. Code - if we have any American volunteer who wants to talk to the NOAA/NGA to confirm it, he will be more than welcome to do so.
@MooseMoney - will send you a message after I unpack my bag and cook some lunch...

Pavel

[jonasaberg]

What happened with the idea of posting the conversation between "us at this thread" and NGA. It was mentioned earlier that the email conversations would/might be released.

...and...if not, why?

What happened as I see it, is that rights to data was release for free use. Then hundreds of hours were put into making the data more valuable, and then the rights to the data was revoked.

1. It is definitely not fair. I think we can agree on that it sucks big time. But, what is the legal situation, maybe that is covered in the emails? What is the judicial point of view on this?
My guess is that NGA released heaps of data they did have the rights to release, but how did that happen?

2. If other sources of data is released. How to we prevent this from happening again? What kind of "free release" of rights of use can be trusted?

I would hate for this to happen again.

/Jonas

[nohal]

Jonas...
The idea that all the people involved in this project should have all the information that exists is still valid, but as I was personally not even part of the communication with the NOAA, I simply can't publish it without permission, which I don't have.
I agree that this whole situation sucks, but there's really little we can do about it.
We have been asked by the NOAA to stop publishing the images of the charts, because NOAA was asked to do that by the NGA, which was most likely under pressure from somewhere else - we may just guess from where if we look at the regions that have been completely withdrawn from U.S. distribution and are not even available in it's printed form anymore...
Even the U.S. agencies are probably very surprised by the fact that they don't have rights to distribute some of the charts they have been printing and selling through their contractors for a couple of decades.
The fact is, that the chart images were not created by us and so we have no right to decide whether it's legal or not to distribute them. What we have created are the calibrations and they stay available without any changes as the dumps of the database. The same applies to all the tools created to produce our KAPs.
I want to believe that the U.S. government has produced at least part of the NGA charts legally and so there will be a way to publish them again in a form of processed KAPs, but the things have to settle down a bit.
Until then the only fair way to handle this situation, safe for the entities that donated the resources hosting data for our project, is unfortunately not to distribute anything that contains the chart images.

Thank you all for understanding and patience

Pavel

[Tia Bu]

Nohal:

You have our very great appreciation for your hard work and programming ingenuity! You also have our patience! As for understanding.... well, that was about as clear as mud .

Can anyone who was part of the conversation with NOAA clarify?

I'm a U.S. citizen and would be glad to help in any way I can in conversing with NOAA, but I'm afraid I really don't understand what has gone on in the conversation up until this date.

[HappySeagull]

a theory...Many of the charts are straight copies of the official charts of other countries. Except they were recoloured and fiddled a little bit by the CIA or the NSA or whoever before printing and distribution among the people that wanted to study them,internally ...These other countries wouldn't care (or couldn't do much about it) in these internal US Government usages but when they were posted,it's different. Plus, we started fiddling with them and I wouldn't be suprised if we put it over the edge...

[jonasaberg]

Pavel,
Who of "us" were contacted by whom at NOAA or NGA?

I kind of feel things are held unnecessary hidden.

/Jonas

[nohal]

Jonas...
The conversation was held between Gunther (Netsurfer here at cruiser's forum), owner and admin of the opencpn.info domain and David B. Enabit, the technical director at the Office of Coast Survey, NOAA. I repeat that I have permission of neither of them to post the correspondence they exchanged, but the message from the NOAA is absolutely clear: The NGA chart image data NOAA published is not covered by the U.S. non-copyright on the government produced work laws and they do not allow us to make available the data they for some time published and we used in this project.

A personal note that will hopefully explain how much I enjoy all this stuff: If I wanted to be a lawyer and spend my time at court suing governments, I would have studied law. For some reason I didn't do it.

Pavel

[LeaseOnLife]

Pavel

Thanks!

I found this on opencpn.info, it probably was the beginning of the end:

Dave Enabnit
January 11th, 2012 on 16:04
I cannot find anywhere on the OpenCPN site where you identify yourselves, indicate the authority under which you are operating, provide an address, or any other information.


Netsurfer
January 11th, 2012 on 18:56
Hi Dave,
this is a private homepage/ project by some of the folks of the OpenCPN community.
For further infos about the OpenCPN Open-Source project please have a look at http://opencpn.org
If you would like to know who am I please visit Impressum | OpenCPN.de
Netsurfer

[nohal]

LeaseOnLife...
Yes, this is the beginning of the whole story. Even though it does not look like that from this single post, Mr. Enabit is probably a pretty fine guy, doing his job well, and is no happier than us about this situation.

Pavel

[jannw]

its a shame someone doesn't anonymously post a torrent of the data ... after all, no harm ... and it was all freely available, so the NOAA has no one to blame but themselves

Hint Hint

[Tia Bu]

I believe there were numerous backups of the data on different servers. Plus a lot of folks had already downloaded a lot of charts for beta testing, etc. So if charts suddenly appeared on torrents, they probably wouldn't be coming from the main project server. I imagine what has prevented that happening so far is that some people on this forum have posted information that the NOAA folks are nice, philosophically in favor of open government information, and trying to find a solution.

If patience is called for, then I think we're all in favor of patience and good faith. But clearer communication of what is going on would probably help keep us all working toward the same end.

[cagney]

Originally Posted by jannw

its a shame someone doesn't anonymously post a torrent of the data ... after all, no harm ... and it was all freely available, so the NOAA has no one to blame but themselves

Hint Hint

I think that you are way off mark. This is a free and open source project, from the start, and as far as I can say the web address of this forum is not PirateBay.

Anyone reading the text within the red frame on NOAA's On-Line Chart Viewer will know that the problem is not with NOAA but with NGA. Comparing the present day website with the same website from last June, will give anyone enough with facts to ask NGA relevant questions.

Thomas

[LeaseOnLife]

Originally Posted by Tia Bu

....

If patience is called for, then I think we're all in favor of patience and good faith. But clearer communication of what is going on would probably help keep us all working toward the same end.

Netsurfer has been MIA on this forum since 8/8/2011. Putting Nohal/Pavel in the position to answer our questions might not be fair, but it seems to be the only way to get some answers...

Originally Posted by cagney

I think that you are way off mark. This is a free and open source project, from the start, and as far as I can say the web address of this forum is not PirateBay.

Anyone reading the text within the red frame on NOAA's On-Line Chart Viewer will know that the problem is not with NOAA but with NGA. Comparing the present day website with the same website from last June, will give anyone enough with facts to ask NGA relevant questions.

Thomas

Thomas, besides telling us what not to do (torrents), what do you suggest we do? Besides, I don't feel included in "Anyone", I wouldn't know what to ask the NGA.

Dirk