hi sean we've talked on the post about open neighborhood boundaries and it didn't really go anywhere. it's a product my company offers, so i clearly have commercial interests at heart, but we also also a free api to geocode to neighborhood, and that could be useful for what many developers need. zillow's data is drawn around tracks/ZIPs/admin boundaries and aren't quite what i'd call a good start...we're already aggregating stats around the boundaries, but it ain't easy--it's difficult to get demographic data at the household level--census SF1 is block level (around 400 homes) and private sources are used to augment, but it's not easy to do what you claim as the data is simply not known home by home
Ian White :: Urban Mapping Inc 690 Fifth Street Suite 200 :: San Francisco CA 94107 T.415.946.8170 x800 :: F.866.385.8266 urbanmapping.com/blog ________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 11:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Lawsuit Claims Mapmaking Firm Owns Your Neighborhood It does sound more like a contract dispute than an issue dealing with open source or openly derived data. Met Bernt briefly and seems like a really good guy. Does stink to get stuck in a situation like this. I think his talk at WhereCamp revolved around this and I remember there being more to the story, but do not remember exactly what that part of the story was. I do think neighborhood boundaries would be a great place to expand OSM if you added a Shapewiki type interface to it. Locals know the boundaries better than any algorithm or top down approach does - although you'll probably have a lot more disputes akin to Cyprus if it were to ever happen. Having a solid open source set of neighborhood geometries would be a great addition. Zillow's boundaries are a good start but having a group expanding and updating it would be most awesome. Then you could aggregate and join all sorts of interesting statistics to the boundaries. Definitely a better reference than a census tract number or zipcode. best, sean FortiusOne Inc, 2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307 Arlington, VA 22201 cell - 202-321-3914 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Schmidt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 2:03:09 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Lawsuit Claims Mapmaking Firm Owns Your Neighborhood On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 10:42:06AM -0700, Ian White wrote: > yeah, as usual, taken out of context..I said local advertising (print+online) > is around $17b > > but isn't the real interesting story more about spatial data and who > owns what...? come on, let's get it on! i know steve c and sean have > some strong opinions about this! In this case? Not in my eyes. A specific work-for-hire was created -- presumably comprised of data and tools to create the data. Both of those would then be owned by the company which hired Wahl to perform the work. "Vermont-based mapping company Maponics is now suing Wahl to keep him from creating any more neighborhood maps "derived from or containing parts of" the original maps he produced four years ago, which defined 7,000 neighborhoods in 100 cities. Wahl did that work as a contractor for a real estate web portal." The data he created there wasn't his. Creating derived data from work that isn't yours is clearly a violation of copyright. I'm not aware of any significant legal opinion that holds that geodata is all in the public domain, especially something so subjective as neighborhood boundaries. (Certainly *you* can't believe that: as far as I understand it, one of Urban Mapping's products is a set of neighborhood boundaries, no?) Neighborhoods especially have to be seen to some extent as a creative work -- and therefore protected by copyright, and not possible to derive further from without an appropriate license. OSM is going out of its way in its current licensing efforts to ensure that something like this takes place only under the restrictions the license puts on things: "Public Domain" is not the goal, "Openly licensed" is. I don't know the specific license that Wahl sells data under, but there's a fair chance that he wouldn't be able to use OSM as a base for something like this -- specifically because it would give any of his customers the rights to be a redistributor unto themselves, cutting him out of the loop (and the cash). To me, there doesn't seem to be anything complex here: Data was created as a contractor. The organization contracting him owned that data. Assuming that the data was then used as a basis for further work -- something that I can't comment on, but Maponics is clearly claiming -- then the derived work is only usable subject to the restrictions Maponics has placed on it -- which appears to be the standard "All Rights Reserved". Neighborhoods aren't facts. Street intersections, maybe, but not neighborhoods. With that in mind, there's not a question in my mind that this work is protected to some extent, and Wahl appears to have (solely based on the article) violated those protections. Now, there's always more under the surface. There's no way for those of us outside the loop to guess how much of the data is actually derived, and that's the thing that the court will decide (or the plantiff and defendant will settle over). The article doesn't lay out anything world changing: It's simply a case of "Work for hire used by contractor as basis for further work without permission." Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
