A somewhat premature and speculative article, I think, but surely this
raises huge questions for OSM in the UK? Apologies if I have missed
discussion or am looking on the wrong list..
---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/mar/26/free-our-data
What will you do come April 1, when Ordnance Survey goes free?
Posted by Charles Arthur, Friday 26 March 2010 17.52 GMT
You hadn't heard? You should have. In a big victory for the Free Our Data
campaign, Gordon Brown has announced that various sets of OS data -
presently expected to be vector and raster datasets from 1:25,000 up to
1:50,000 maps will be made available for free reuse, including commercial
reuse.
That's going to create the possibility of paper maps created using OS data,
but which are tailored to specific niche uses - rambling, climbing,
canoeing, horse-riding, tourism, say.
Then there are all the potential online uses - which the Show Us A Better
Way competition, and its winners, could exploit in all sorts of ways that
they weren't able to before.
One of the key changes that's expected to take effect is the removal of the
"derived data" restriction - under which Ordnance Survey claimed that if
you used its maps (physical or digital) to create a dataset, then it had
copyright on the new product. Broadly like Microsoft claiming a share on
the royalties for your book because you wrote it with Word. (Not exactly,
of course, because you generally need a map to view the map-derived
dataset.)
The "derived data" argument has been one of the fiercest, if out of sight
of most consumers, in the geographic world. Local government didn't like it
at all, as we explained in November 2008.
The other interesting question is whether OpenStreetMap will incorporate
the released OS data - expected to go under a Creative Commons Attribution
licence - into its database. That would at a stroke mean that it will cover
the whole of Britain. (OSM will, we're sure, want to wait until it sees the
precise details of the licences and the datasets to comment.)
But we're definitely interested to hear how you'd like to see the OS data
used.
The details of how the release of this data haven't been released either,
but my understanding is that it will receive direct funding from the
Treasury, which has made a financial commitment to cover the revenue lost
from selling those datasets - reckoned to be about £20m. That still leaves
the OS's large-scale MasterMap as a paid-for product, producing about £80m
of revenue, and a good - lion's? - share of its profits.
The other question is what will happen to the traditional OS maps. We
expect to have more on that next week.
But for now - what would you do with those datasets?
---
Martin, ** CycleStreets - For Cyclists, By Cyclists
Developer, CycleStreets ** http://www.cyclestreets.net/
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