I'm uploading (to http://wrp.geothings.net/ ) a bunch of large-scale maps found in a drawer by University Estates Directorate staff who very kindly let me use their scanner to make digital copies after checking their copyright status to a first approximation. I'll probably need some helpers for the tedious business of rectifying later on, will update on talk-gb for that.
More general question though: what's the legal status of an in-house copy, or copies printed from microfilm or photocopied in-house? All such copies were presumably made under license of course; no evidence to the contrary. The maps I dug out fell into three categories: 1. O/S printed originals, on good, slightly yellowing paper stock with publication dates and everything. These are the ones I felt happy about making copies of, provided the original publication dates were <= 1958, and these are what I'm currently uploading. So that's paper(1958) -> scanned(2009)[when o.o.c.] -> osm which is clean. I'll not be uploading copies (just yet / possibly ever?) of: 2. Paper copies done from microfilm, presumably, with evident optical blurring and other artefacts you might expect to see from a photostatic process. Original pub dates <= 1958 on the sheets, but when was the microfilm made and by who? And does that matter? Less weighty paper than 1., but whiter. So assume that's paper(1958) -> microfilmed(?) -> printed(?) [ -> photocopies? ] 3. Same as 2, but messed up with purple grot very much like the stuff used in old Banda machines. Could just have been stored with the sheets used for a process like that, I suppose. All pre-1959. So that's paper(1958) -> [god alone knows] -> [what can we do with it?] So my question is: does in-house (no doubt _licensed_) copying at an unknown time affect copyright status as far as OSM is concerned, and does running off paper copies from microfilm at an unknown time, from film (re)published at an unknown time (but with apparently acceptably dates for the original) affect whether we can make copies for tracing into OSM? I don't think any of the in-house copies were made within the Crown Copyright period of 50 years post-publication: everything looked more than a few years old. (It would be nice to have UK copyright law chapter and verse on this, but all I've read recently on that is this: http://jergames.blogspot.com/2009/02/uk-copyright-law-in-verse.html ) -- Andrew Chadwick _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk