[geo-discuss] Re: Fwd: [ordnancemaps] Soviet Military Maps of UK

Sat Aug 20 20:39:41 UTC 2005

I just filed a FOIA request to get the electoral boundaries for my
city (Halifax, NS, Canada) because our local planning office would not
(could not?) give me shapefiles. That said, I was free to create my
own shapefiles from the publicly available PDFs, as well as the legal
descriptions.

The notion that it would not be possible to create your own shapefiles
without infringing some copyright is utterly appalling. If this is
indeed the case, it calls for some civil disobedience. Would they dare
arrest you for wearing a t-shirt with your electoral district map on
it?

On 8/20/05, Chris Lightfoot <chris at ex-parrot.com> wrote:

> This means that *in practice* adminstrative boundary data
> are copyright of Ordnance Survey. In principle...  well,
> it's not really clear. Although not every administrative
> boundary is defined solely by reference to a copyright
> map, there is no other way in which they can be
> interpreted: if some area A is defined in terms of the
> boundaries of areas B and C, then you need to know where
> those boundaries lie, and the only data which establish
> those are themselves OS copyright.
> 
> I do not know whether there is a way to bootstrap this,
> but it is an interesting question!